


Act 5: Til the End of Time

by thesecondseal



Series: More Than Smoke: A Noir AU [6]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Ballroom Dancing, Blood and Injury, Detective Noir, F/M, Film Noir, Fluff, Guns, Halamshiral, Kirkwall (Dragon Age), Past Relationship(s), Reconciliation, Romance, Sexual Content, The Winter Palace (Dragon Age), Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-11 15:18:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5631289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecondseal/pseuds/thesecondseal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Essa returns from Haven battleweary, heartsore, and a little self-destructive. Luckily, the younger Hawke is there to bust necessary heads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Everything Changes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *slinks in with head down* So...uh...I realized that I forgot to post this chapter. It was written for the Satinalia list. I'm so sorry. Actual Chapter One.
> 
>  
> 
> The lyrics used are from the incomparable Sting’s The Hounds of Winter.

Winter wandered quietly through Kirkwall, the wind whispering cold and bitter through the empty streets. Far beyond the factory dust and coal clouds the stars might glitter bright in the firmament, but here the only sparkle was millions of holiday lights, twinkling in defiance of the city’s perpetual grey. Satinalia was closing in upon them as was the trip to Halamshiral for the Winter Masque, but Cassandra had given all of them one blissful week of R&R and Cullen couldn’t help but be grateful. 

He knew that he needed the time to regroup. The headaches and nightmares had only gotten worse since Haven, his subconscious no doubt still reeling from adjusting to their new reality. Dragons. Maker’s Breath, he wouldn’t believe it if he hadn’t seen the monster with his own eyes. Hadn’t watched it rain fire and death upon a quiet mountain town.That impossibility was bad enough, but to then learn that someone had used red lyrium to turn the creature into a weapon of mass destruction…. It was too much on even the best day and Cullen hadn’t been having many of those lately.

He stood in front of his stove, waiting for water to boil for the tea he didn’t want but that Sera insisted would help with his headaches. Of course, she was right. He didn’t know how she had come by the stuff—and he had been instructed not to ask—but whatever comprised the herbal blend seemed to help more than most things. As it didn’t have any strange or hallucinogenic side effects, he simply thanked her for the gift and let it be. People thought the woman was crazy, but she was good for him. Most of the time he remembered to tell her so.   

Cullen leaned back against the kitchen counter, one eye on the stove, one on the newly painted walls. It was a soft sea-grey now, hints of blue and green when the sun shone through the bare windows. He had come home late one night to find the apartment smelling of fresh paint, a note on the kitchen counter that said simply:  _ better to ask forgiveness than permission.  _ Sera’s handwriting, and she readily took the blame, but Cullen didn’t think she had completed the job alone. If he’d any attachment to the apartment, he might have felt invaded, but for the first time since he had moved in, Cullen could inhabit the space with some sort of ease.

A sad carol filtered through the faint static of his old radio. It was a favorite of his, though he had never quite appreciated the lyrics as he did this year.

_ …the hounds of winter, howling in the wind. I walk through the day, my coat around my ears… _

He pulled his robe more tightly against the cold. He suspected Essa of having more than a little to do with the unexpected gift of color, but after everything that had passed between them, hope was a folly he feared to indulge. Upstairs he could hear her clunking around the living room, her tread deliberately loud. Ever since the snowstorm, she had adopted the habit to let him know when she was home, but he still wasn’t certain of what exactly that invitation was extending.  

For now, Cullen waited.

… _ as dark as December…as cold as the Man in the Moon… _

The kettle shrieked, drawing him from his thoughts. Cullen poured water into his mug, dropped a tea ball in with a fainter clank than the noises coming from above. Color and scent diffused and he watched the herbs steep, took a deep breath of aromatics that smelled strongly of mint and citrus, others colors he couldn’t name.  He wandered across his apartment to stand before the windows, let the mug warm his hands as he stared out at the falling snow and lifted his voice along with the radio.

“ _ I can’t make up the fire the way that she could, I spend all my days in the search for dry wood.” _

He missed her.  It didn’t make sense how much. They had shared such little time—and what madness that had been he would never know—but he missed her as powerfully as he did himself some days.

And found her so much farther beyond his reach than the man he had hoped to be.

“ _ Board all the windows and close the front door, I can’t believe she won’t be here anymore…” _

“Shit!” The expletive was sounded closer than it should have. The sound cut through musings that drifted too close to mauldlin. Cullen blinked at the press of night against his window, certain that—

He shook his head. No, it couldn’t have been.  He stared down at the ground in alarm, but saw only an unbroken expanse of white, confirming that what he had thought he’d seen was just some trick of the night.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

The shadow passed again before him, a dark silhouette of familiar legs that swung once, twice, then lifted. A bare foot dangled at the top of his window, toes scrambling for purchase on whatever they might find. Cullen dropped his mug to the corner of the sill and pulled up the sash.

“Essa?” He stuck his head out the window, turning his head up to stare at her, body momentarily forgotten as he watched her feet dangle, inches above his face. “Maker’s breath, woman! What are you doing?”

“Putting up lights?”

She had a strand of twinkling white lights tangled around one arm; both hands were clinging to the window ledge above him. She didn’t sound at all as if she were hanging precariously above a four story drop.

“On the outside of the building?” he asked incredulously.

“Well…sure,” Her voice was somewhat muffled. He watched her blow snow out of her face. “Where do you put them?”

“I don’t.” He brushed snow and ice from his window ledge, and turned to sit, bracing his legs against the wall inside as he reached up with one hand to take hold of one leg. “I have you.”

“Do you?” she asked, staring down the line of her body to meet his gaze. Her feet were just below his shoulders and she was smiling, but her eyes were dark and heavy.

Cullen nodded, got a firm grip on the window casing with his other hand. “If you let go, you’ll land in my lap.”

Essa snorted skeptically. “I’ll hit your chest first and you’ll just beat me to the ground. I’m heavier than you think.”

He swept a smooth arc across the back of her calf with his thumb. “I remember,” he murmured, was surprised to feel her shiver. “Now, let go.”

*

“You cannot be serious,” Essa declared flatly to the frosted brick before her.

Her arms were stretched above her head, bare skin scraped as she hung face first against the side of the brownstone. A string of white lights was knotted around her arm; it had the audacity to twinkle at her and she suspected—though she couldn’t see his face—that Cullen was laughing at her.

“I am absolutely serious.” His voice came from below and behind her. There was too much space between them. Essa’s stomach lurched and she gripped the cold brick tighter.

“Just let go.” She had lost count of how many times he had given the order. One less, she supposed, than the number of times her stubborn fingers had refused to let go of her window ledge.

“Why don’t you just push me back up?”

She could only hope he didn’t hear the tremor in her voice. Her feet scrambled futilely against the top of his window, knocking back into his face. She didn’t know how long she had been hanging between floors, but her scraped fingers and screaming shoulders thought it had been long enough. Cullen gently caught her ankles and she tried to use the meager pressure as a support.

“Essa, it’s only a few feet,” Cullen assured her calmly. His fingers were a cool sweep across her chilled skin and she told herself it was only fatigue that made her arms shake. “I will not drop you. You will not knock me to my death ahead of you.”

She glanced down between her body and the side of the building, watched snow sift down to land on the crimson flannel of his robe, counted endless seconds in their slow plummet.

“The fall might not kill me at that,” Cullen added helpfully. “The snow is really piling up down there.”

Nope. She wasn’t letting go. There wasn’t a logical reason in all of the Maker’s good earth for her to let go. She was the Welterweight Champion of the Free Marches, the Champion of Jader, the Herald of Andraste. She was a fucking Dragonslayer! She was more than strong enough to pull herself up the side of a building.

“Are you afraid of heights?” he asked suddenly.

“What?” Essa sputtered, staring obstinately at the cracks in the brick before her. “Would I be standing on a fourth floor window ledge if I were afraid of heights?”

“If you were anyone else, I would say no.” His voice was low with amusement. She had startled him when she first fell, but now that he was stretched out of his window beneath her, he seemed to be doing a lot better than she was.

“Point to you,” she mumbled, wondering how he could even hear her over the blood pounding in her ears.

She pulled up on her arms, muscles flexing easily into the familiar movement, but the string of lights was still tangled around one arm and was yet caught on whatever it had decided to catch on when it yanked her down in the first place.

“Can you see what my lights are caught on?” she asked. “I can probably pull myself back up if we can untangle them.”

She couldn’t see his face, but she could hear the laughter mingling with wry exasperation. “Your impressive upper body strength aside, Trevelyan, you would already be safe inside if you would just. let. go.”

His fingertips were drawing soft patterns across her skin. He tugged gently on the last word and Essa kicked at his hand.

“I’m not afraid of heights,” she snapped, adjusting her grip, trying to remember what her record was for pullups and what that translated into hang time. Her knuckles were white, fingertips scraped raw against the cold rough surface. Brick was a poor substitute for the bar. “I’m afraid of leaping from them.”

“Ah.” His hands squeezed her feet gently in sympathy. There was too much understanding in that quiet syllable. “Alright then. Let me get my feet on the ledge, you can stand on my—”

“No!” By the Mabari was he trying to fall too? “Just—“

Essa took a slow deep breath, willed her panicked grip to loosen.

“On three,” she said finally, letting her breath out with a shudder. “One…two…”

She would never remember saying three. Nor would she recall beyond that single bright stuttering of her heart, the short fall into his arms, only that he caught her as he had promised. He was still hanging onto the window casing with one hand but the other moved from her calf to her waist, grabbed  hold of the waistband of her pajamas pants and held fast even as his torso curled up to stop her fall, defying gravity for them both. Essa landed on her bottom, her back to his face, legs dropping down through his and the open window. Her heart dropped to her feet, weight dragging her ass down to his lap before she could even try to slow her plunge.

“I’ve got you.”

The words were murmured against the back of her neck as she flung frantic hands out to grasp at the window trim.  Cullen’s legs caught against the wall inside and braced.  Essa could feel his heart beating, slow and steady against the back of hers.

“Essa? Darling, I’ve got you.”

His hands moved to her arms, rubbed briskly at skin gone cold with nerves. She turned her face toward him, dropping her shoulder to meet his gaze through the belligerent twinkle of the lights still caught around her arm.

“Are you alright?”

His chest was warm against her back, the flannel of his sleeves soft against her abraded arms. He smelled like peppermint and bergamot and Maker, forgive her,  she had never known it was possible to miss someone so damn much.

“I’m…” Essa licked her lips, found that they were perilously close to his. The man’s mouth was made for kissing. She should never have done it the first time, much less so many more times that she had lost count.

“We should get inside,” she said, warning him of her reckless impulses. “Before I kiss you.”

Cullen’s eyes spun whisky dark and his hands tightened once on her arms before he let her go. Essa scrambled down his body, ignoring the play of muscles that still chased her too often from frustrating dreams. She stood just inside his window, stamping her bare feet against the floor, eyes shut tightly against temptation. She hadn’t kissed him since Haven, and that had been an understandable abandonment of all reason. They had both been certain she was charging to her death.

There would be no such excuse now, and they were still completely wrong for one another, no matter what their bodies thought. No matter what nonsense their hearts persisted. Nothing had changed.

“You’re wrong,” he whispered and Essa realized she had spoken the last words aloud. Cullen’s fingers traced her jaw, thumb a gentle pressure beneath her chin as he tilted her face slowly up.  “Look at me, please.”

She shook her head, knew that her cowardice did neither of them any credit, but there it was, half of everything that was wrong between them.

“Cullen…”

His breath whispered against her skin. She could feel the warmth of his lips just out of reach, a teasing pass just beside her mouth, skimming, but never quite touching her jaw, her cheek. He passed her lips with a soft exhale, treated the other side of her face to the same exquisite taunt as his hands tangled gently in her, offering soft restraint when she tried to close the distance between them.

“Look at me.”

Slowly, Essa opened her eyes, and he kissed her, a hard consummation of lips and tongue, a brief scrape of teeth before he drew away.

“Everything has changed.”

 


	2. Another day, another demon

The night was sodden above the last carpeting of unseasonable snow, a grey mess of rain that didn’t have the decency to fall out of the cloudy sky and melt the muddy slush. The air was thick with water; mist loomed above the streets, heavy and unceasing. Fat droplets coalesced on rooftops and windows, clung to coats and skin with damp fingers, dug through layers to lay cold and aching against bone and injuries both and new. Essa had plenty of both, and she had been cold since Haven, a perpetual chill that left her uneasy and uncertain. Restless. Looking for answers to questions she dare not ask. She had hoped that being back in Kirkwall would help and wasn’t that saddest wish fading in a chump’s eye?

“He’s not here, Mirabelle.”

Essa didn’t glance up as Varric took the chair across from her. Corff had given her a bottle of the good stuff when she stormed into _The Hanged Man_ who knew how many hours ago. The bartender had been smart enough to direct her to a table and staunch enough to ignore her snarl when she saw the red ribbon around the neck of the bottle and realized Garrett had left it for her.

“Think I don’t know that?”

She wasn’t fool enough to have come here looking for him. She just hadn’t been willing to pitch face first to the bottom of a bottle while her sister hovered over her at _the Tourney,_ and her usual sanctuaries no longer provided any refuge. She already knew hiding out at the cottage was pointless. One good snowstorm and Cari sent their resident knight on a botched rescue that nearly killed him.

“You know,” Essa muttered, chin bumping against the tabletop as she stared past Varric into the dwindling crowd.  “It’s not always about Hawke, Varric.”

As if there weren’t enough on her plate with still missing mages, increasingly convoluted red lyrium trails, and a blighted dragon, for Andraste’s sake! Weren’t those enough without an assassination plot against the Empress of Orlais? Weren’t those enough without the constant nightmares? Dreams of demons and great green tears guttering in the veil.

No, Essa thought, staring at the partially peeled label of her bottle. Must not be enough, because here she was, mourning love lost and running from love found too close in bright succession. The _15_ was all the remained of _MacKenna 15._ Half her life. Didn’t quite seem right that so much wisdom be wasted on the likes of her, but maybe if she kept drinking, she’d find the answers she needed in the aged rye.

“I know everything isn’t about Hawke.”

Essa grunted.

“But maybe,” Varric continued, unperturbed. “This is a little about Hawke.”

“And Cullen,” Essa nodded at the whorls in the pine planks before her and headed off what was invariably the next conversational step. “Don’t forget him.”

She wasn’t sure what time of night it was or how long she had been slouched across the end of the table. She just knew that since she arrived no one had bothered her. No one had asked for her autograph, or to shake the hand of the woman who had brought down the Dragon of Haven. No one asked how she was doing or feeling or where she was going, or—Andraste be praised—what was going on with her and Cullen. As if she had any hope of knowing.

 _Everything has changed_ , he’d said.

Well, of course it had. Essa tossed back another gulp of amber, slumped down more comfortably into the unforgiving contours of the ladder back chair. The floor was rough beneath her feet and she wondered with a vague sense of alarm where her shoes had gone. There weren’t many places she wouldn’t walk barefoot, but the tavern was definitely one of them.

“I guess there’s no point in asking how you’re holding up,” Varric supposed.

“You guess right.” Her eyelids were heavy. Essa propped her chin on one fist, elbows sprawling wide like flightless wings. She didn’t bother trying to meet the concern she knew lay hidden in his gaze. “I’ll live. Dragonslayer remember?”

“I remember.” The reply was mild, unconcerned, the same tone he so often used to patronize Hawke. The comparison made her angry, but it also made her laugh. By the Mabari, if she had needed a reminder of how glorious a disaster the two of them had been, Varric was her man.

“Dunno what I’m doing here, Varric.” Essa pulled her feet up, hooked her heels on one of the chair’s support rungs to keep her toes off the floor.

“Don’t you?”

The world swayed around her and it took her too long to realize it was the table moving. Essa cracked open one eye she didn't remember closing, watched Varric arrange his notepad and pens before him with the smooth, practiced movements that bordered on ritual. The noise of the bar never bothered him. He liked watching people and Maker knew the dwarf saw too much. These days everyone did. She had lost any masks she might once have boasted. Her heart was a raging, volatile thing and she wore it in eyes bruised through with love and fire.

“Maybe,” Essa conceded.

The apartment was a bust, and not just because Fin and Bethany lurked worse than her mabari. Downstairs, Cullen paced a trench in the floor of the cell he called home. She could hear him every night, rattling around like a new ghost when she hadn’t dealt with the old one.

Essa walked her fingers across the table, steps stumbling when they reached the bottles, scabbed knuckles catching in that damn ribbon and nearly toppling it to the scarred oak beneath her elbows. She stared blearily at the rippling glass, pulled in a breath that tasted like cheap smoke and expensive whiskey. She had been drinking too much if the light through her bottle could be trusted. She watched the line of amber waver in her unsteady grip, shifted her glare down into her empty glass. It took too much to keep her warm these days. Had killing the dragon stolen her fire? she wondered. Or had she given it away?

She didn’t suppose it much mattered.

“Big damn hero.” Essa lifted her chin from her fist, pointed back at her throat with her thumb. She laughed darkly. “But all I do is run, Varric. Didya know that? I’m a runner, not a fighter.”

Mabari knew she had never expected to learn that about herself, but here she was. The past few months had stolen her footing and Essa didn't think she would ever get it back. She had prided herself on her discipline, once upon a time so long ago it might have been a fairy tale. She was growing real tired of feeling so completely out of control.

“You’ve scars enough to suggest otherwise,” Varric replied.  He took the bottle from her, poured a scant finger into the bottom of her glass.

“It’s not enough,” Essa said, but she wasn’t sure if she meant the scars or the alcohol or herself.

The tavern was warm; she shivered as the door opened and a gust of the night rushed in, curled cool like a rain cloud around her feet. She was still cold, was beginning to think she would always be cold.  Essa lifted her glass to her lips, breathed in hints of vanilla and char, memories of oak cured and set from years before she found her fire and brought down a mountain.

“Shouldn’t miss him,” she muttered, because If she couldn’t admit it to Varric, to whom could she?

The words echoed inside her glass, had the grace to sound like someone else’s confession. Essa swallowed her drink, grimaced as it went down wrong. The spirits burned in her throat the same way he had burned in her veins and for a too brief moment, she felt warm again and breathless.

“I didn’t realize that you were in love with him.”

Cullen’s voice was soft behind her, bore neither accusation nor doubt, though she felt the sting of each on the back of her neck.

Essa lifted her glass over her shoulder in a drunken salute.          

“Yeah, well. I didn’t either.”

She shoved herself upright, tipping her head back to stare up at him through the gloom. Gravity betrayed her, heavy head dragging her back toward the floor. Cullen caught her chair with careful hands, set all four legs on the floor without touching her.

“But you,” Essa nodded as the sudden clarity struck, a bright and brassy jolt as damning as any Chantry bell. “I knew you were trouble the moment I saw you. Jumped in so certain I could handle whatever you threw at me.”

She laughed too loudly. “What are you doing here?” Essa asked.

Corff glanced over from the bar. “I called him,” he admitted, holding up both hands to ward off her temper. “You told me to.”

She could feel Varric’s and Cullen’s incredulous stares. “I—“ But the refutation died on her lips. “Oh, fuck me…I did.”

“You did.” Corff nodded, smile hidden so quickly she might have imagined it as he moved back off, towel in hand, to refill a round of drinks at the far end of the bar.

Essa clunked her head back down on the table, turned to the side to peer with unfocused eyes through the tangle of her hair. Memory teased in ruthless flashes. The fall from her window ledge. Twinkle lights wrapped around her arm, the cheerful glow mocking the sting of fear in her throat. The Dragonslayer was afraid of heights; it would have been funny if it weren’t so sad.

And Cullen had saved her.

“Am I still in my pajamas?” she groaned.

“You are,” Cullen confirmed, easing down into the chair beside her as if she were some wild creature he was afraid of startling.

Maybe she was. They had kissed one another senseless and then she had run from him, without shoes or a coat or a thought beyond her own faithlessness. By the Mabari, she was such coward!

“You’re not,” Cullen murmured.

“I said that out loud.” It wasn’t a question, but Essa lolled her head into something resembling an upright position to look at him in hazy askance anyway.  

“You did.” His smile was gentle. He plucked the glass from her lax grip, pressed his lips to smudges left by hers and sipped down her last swallow.

“Cullen—”

The door to the tavern burst open and group of drunken carolers stumbled in, voices lifted in Satinalia merriment that drowned out whatever she might have said.

“ _Love and joy come to you! And to you a-wassail too! Maker bless you and send you a winter full of cheer!”_

Essa winced. This time last year, it had been her, Garrett, and Isabela serenading _the Hanged Man_. So many memories. It was hard to tell which tangles of her heart were knotted the tightest now, but she knew one thing with certainty.

“You can’t go back.”

“Now, that,” Varric said, subtly easing her whiskey away. “Is the honest truth.”

Essa caught the bottle just before he moved it beyond her reach. She tsked at him.

“Can’t trust you to give it back,” she groused as he deigned to look offended, one hand lifted to chest. Essa smirked and turned back to Cullen. “I had Corff call you because I didn’t want you to worry.”

Well, any more than her desperate retreat had already caused. He had worries enough, especially now, and Essa couldn’t think of much she hated more than knowing she was one of them. She was a fighter and a runner, just as she said, but she had grown tired of both sometime past. Cullen was like her cottage. He made her want to build things. Made her wish she held healing in her hands instead of flame and fury and death.

“I’m sorry.” She made what she thought was a valiant attempt at contrition, one that was mostly genuine.  “I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

“Because of Hawke.” Confusion moved dark and skittering through the honeyed sunlight of his gaze. He took the bottle from her hand, poured himself a drink in the glass he hadn’t yet returned to her.

“Maybe.” Essa scowled. “I don’t know.”

She sat up straighter, listed to one side as she shoved her damp hair back from her face. The carolers were bellying up to the bar and buying drinks for the house. The resulting din filled her ears, became the muted roar of a thousand terrified villagers. Chair legs scraped across the hardwood and the sharp crack of a barstool falling to floor rocked through Essa like so many gunshots. Embers breathed, scarlet and amber and blue as witchlight in the fraught stillness around her heart.

“I need to get out of here.”

Somehow she was mostly on her feet, found her legs were—mostly—steady enough to get her to the door though the floor rolled beneath her like the deck of a storm-pitched sloop. Essa crashed past a dozen patrons, knocked two chairs and the umbrella stand over before she hit her knees outside in the cool wet and heaved up too many glasses of whiskey.

“Maker’s breath!”

She heard the solemn oath a moment before the world pitched again and she was lifted from the sidewalk. She would know his arms anywhere. Love’s foolishness aside, they were the only ones she had ever dreamed about in the pastel gleanings of undeclared tomorrows.

“Andraste’s ass,” Essa swore. “Cullen, just put me down. Go home. Pretend you don’t know me.”

The sidewalk was blessedly empty, lined with parked cars and facing a street that boasted very little traffic. In the distance the Chantry bells struck two. The mist, an annoyance all evening, felt blessedly cool against her overheated face, but Essa didn’t have time to appreciate how warm she suddenly was. Cullen held her at an odd angle, arms banded around her hips in case she wasn’t through humiliating herself. Her stomach rebelled above the pressure, but there was nothing left for it to lose.

Tomorrow, she thought with a jolt of determination. Tomorrow she would get up, put on her meanest suit, her highest heels, and her shiniest guns and put all this nonsense behind her.

“You got her?” Varric was only seconds behind them, concern no longer hidden behind carefully cultivated indifference.

“I’m fine,” Essa insisted. She drew in a breath, tried to find the words to convince them to leave her to her foolishness.

“You most certainly are not fine.”

The sharp reprimand cracked through the quiet night, and Cullen turned—Essa still in his arms—to face her accuser. Bethany stood just inside the pool of light that slanted out of the open door of the  _Hanged Man_ , dark hair still pinned neatly and simply beneath the crisp white folds of her nurse’s cap. Her uniform was wrinkled, but mostly clean beneath an open taupe trench, and the gaze she narrowed at them was one that Essa knew had withered more than one recalcitrant hospital assistant.

“Put her down, Rutherford.”

Cullen eased Essa toward the ground, balanced her bare feet on the top of his shoes so that she wasn’t standing on the filthy street. Essa wobbled, hands reaching behind her to catch at him for balance. Her thumbs caught behind his belt and his grip on her elbows tightened just shy of pain.

"Sorry," she mumbled for his ears alone. Her hands fell away and his grasp gentled. 

“Where,” Bethany demanded, folding her arms across her chest and tapping one foot in disapproval.  “Are your shoes, Essa Trevelyan?” Her sensible shoe rapped a loud staccato against the wet concrete.

“At home.”

Bethany blinked at her, slowly, dangerously, eyes lazy as a cat’s and twice as deadly.

“How much did she drink?” the question was launched at Varric who—obliging traitor that he was—held up the half-empty bottle he had been smart enough not to leave on the table.

“Alright.” Beth nodded almost to herself, adjusted the crossbody strap of her purse so that the bag was behind her hip. “I thought I’d get a brief reprieve from this sort of nonsense now that Garrett’s gone, but alright.”

Essa didn’t see the move coming, neither did Cullen if the rough clasp of his hands on her bare arms was any indication in his surprise. Beth’s shoulder hit Essa at the waist and before anyone could stop her, she had neatly pulled Essa from Cullen’s arms into a perfect fireman’s carry.

“Beth, what in the Void?”

Her arm banded, strong and sure across the back of Essa’s thighs. Essa’s head bounced above Beth’s purse.

“You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“I’m not.” Beth stalked, gate surprisingly steady as she made her way into the tavern. “You think I didn’t learn my lesson too?”

Essa was briefly aware of bawdy cheers as Bethany made her way across the main floor, steps angry but unhurried. The carolers picked up an old sailor’s reel, something lascivious that Garrett would have loved, but their teasing ended so abruptly, Essa knew Bethany had treated them to her cruelest scowl.

“I’ve been building muscle ever since,” she continued coolly. “I can carry Fin about a quarter mile before my legs start hating me. Getting you upstairs won’t be hard.”

Essa was too stunned to struggle. “You…what?”

Her head lurched, and she gritted her teeth, breathing sharply through her nose to combat nausea as they ascended the stairs.

“You think it didn’t kill me that night too?” Bethany asked, quiet voice unusually rough. “Watching you hurt and bleeding trying to drag Garrett to safety, knowing I was too fucking weak to help?”

Her grip tightened on Essa’s legs. “Never. Again.”

A single templar’s bullet and the courses of three lives had been altered.

“Fair enough,” Essa muttered. “But I can walk.”

“No,” Bethany retorted, and Essa could feel the warmth of her magic seeping into tired aching muscles. “You can’t. You’ve the first stages of alcohol poisoning, your metabolism is only _just_ returning to normal, and I’m not even going to start on your feet.”

They reached the second floor landing and Bethany turned sharply enough that Essa’s head nearly cracked against the wall. Cullen’s hand stopped the collision, and Essa could only sigh in strange relief. Her night had definitely taken a turn she would never have expected.

“Beth…?”

“What?” She stopped before the door to her apartment, toe tapping in time with Essa’s pulsing, pounding head. “Keys are in the front pocket of my purse, Essa.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Upside down, caught somewhere between annoyance and amusement, Essa rooted around obediently in Bethany’s handbag until she found her keys.

“Here.”

“Give them to Rutherford,” Beth snarled in a reasonable imitation of her brother. “He’s dying to be useful.”

Cullen’s open palm came into the blurry field of Essa’s vision and she gratefully dropped the keys into his hand. She heard the key slide into the lock as Bethany shifted her grip, shoulder jutting hard against her still queasy stomach. The door opened and a wall of warm air hit Essa’s too hot face. The world returned to its earlier pitch and sway.

“Beth…I’m going to be sick again.”

“Not on my carpet you’re not.” A wave of cool healing spread through Essa’s body. “Bathroom,” Bethany added tersely, directing Cullen toward the closed door to their right.

“Beth…?”

“What is it now, Essa?”

“I kinda hate you.”

Bethany laughed, patted her thigh lightly. “I know you do, honey. We’ll take care of that too.”

  



	3. Some Enchanted Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's work on getting these two crazy kids back together before the world falls down, shall we?

“Beth...if you don’t turn the hot water down,” Essa warned in what she hoped was a suitably pitiable voice. “I’m going to be sick again.”

“That’s why you’re in the bathtub,” Bethany retorted pertly from the other side of a pink and yellow chintz shower curtain that did nothing to improve Essa’s vision or throbbing head.

For the fifth time since Bethany stripped her down with ruthless—and admirable---efficiency, Essa stared at the bottom of the tub and thanked the Maker that the ceramic was white. A plain, clean, serviceable white. Bethany’s taste ran to Ferelden Country Cottage and except for the mosaic of black and white tile, white appliances, and standard white counters, every wall, carpet, and fabric in her apartment was a shade of floral, rose, cream, or butter. Her bathroom was a wash of cabbage of roses on fields of sunny yellow, and they made Essa’s eyes water just trying to focus on the soft floral edges. She knew, because Cari had exclaimed more than once at Bethany’s fine eye, that the décor was executed with impeccable class, but Andraste preserve poor Fin, because Essa didn’t know what the man was going to do once they were wed. She couldn’t see their tastes meshing, and she sure as the Void couldn’t see Bethany bending.

“You shouldn’t have anything left to throw up anyway,” Bethany continued casually. “And the hot water should start running out soon.”

“From your lips to the Maker’s ears,” Essa grunted. Was it wishful thinking, or was the water pounding on her back a little cooler than it had been a moment ago? She stared at the floor of the tub, watched the as the endless stream of water ran from her body to the drain.

“Are you going to tell me what’s really on your mind?” The shower curtain rustled and Essa looked up to see Bethany’s silhouette beside her head. “I mean, I can call Fin if you’d like, but I’m willing to bet that at least a third of what you’re worrying over falls firmly into that category of things you two only discuss in grunted monosyllables.”

“Unfair, Beth,” Essa groused.

“But true.”

“Yes, true.”

The water was definitely colder now. Essa tipped her face up to the shower spray with a little moan. The hot water had loosened her sore joints and aching muscles, now she waited for the cold to settle her crawling skin back into place. Essa adjusted her grip on her knees, tipped her face back into the loose basket of her arms, took a slow breath sheltered from the falling water.

“I’m tired, Beth.”

“You have every right to be tired,” Bethany replied reasonably. “You killed a  _ dragon,  _ Essa. You became the face of a rising para-military organization that only recently occupied an abandoned fortress between two unstable nations and you uncovered an assassination plot for the empress of Orlais. It’s been a hectic few weeks for you. Weeks you should have spent mending injuries and resting, not settling disputes at Skyhold and following leads on old cases you should probably turn over to someone else.”

She didn’t sound nearly as reasonable when she was done speaking; she sounded worried.  Essa heard her get up, turned her face back toward the curtain to watch Bethany’s shadow pace back and forth across the small bathroom.

“I know,” Essa sighed. “But I can’t just—Cari is counting on me, and the whole red lyrium thing seems to be connected anyway, or did you miss the part about the dragon being twisted with it?”

“No, I didn’t miss that part.”

“And anyway,” Essa continued. “I was tired before all that. I’ve been tired since—“

Bethany stopped pacing. “The night we nearly lost Garrett.”

“Yeah,” Essa nodded, chin bumping against wet knees. “I’ve been in Kirkwall for too long, Beth. This place…it’s going to kill me if the Inquisition doesn’t.”

She scrubbed her hand through her hair, fingers catching on tangles. “Shampoo?”

Bethany reached in, pulled a bottle from the rack hanging from the shower head and passed it down to her.

“Cari and I haven’t been a family since Mathieu died,” Essa mumbled as she began to wash her hair. “I don’t know if we can get past sharing that kind of guilt, and I—“

She choked a little on the confession, shoved past the tears that blocked her throat. “I don’t know what it was like for you to lose Carver, Beth, but that night…”

Bethany’s stillness filled the small room, but Essa soldiered on. “I knew I couldn’t be the one who took Garrett from you, and that fool would never let me take my own bullets.”

She dragged herself slowly to her feet, eyes closed, hands braced against the tile wall as she lifted her head closer to the shower. The curtain switched back angrily. Essa didn’t bother to meet Bethany’s furious stare.

“Garrett Hawke can find his own trouble. Those of us who love him know this.”

Essa nodded. “He can, and we do. That’s part of why I turned coward, but Beth, you can’t tell me that I wasn’t going to get him killed.”

She trailed one hand down her body, fingers straying to the scar left from the bullet that had gone through Garrett’s chest. “You both have better odds without me and I…I need to know that you have that chance. Do you understand?”

“I do,” but she didn’t sound happy about it. That Bethany wasn’t trying to shake sense into her or freezing her feet to the bathtub floor was about the best sign of understanding Essa could hope for. “So what with the last few months?”

“Cream rinse?” Essa asked.

“By your head.” The answer was issued tightly, the curtain snapped back into place. Essa couldn’t blame Bethany for her ire; they all carried too many scars. If Essa had been strong enough, she would have stayed away.

“I don’t have an excuse.” Essa ran the conditioning cream through her hair with trembling fingers. “The whole mess with Cullen knocked me ass over tits in the worst way. Fin was in Starkhaven.  I ran straight back to the ring and the people I felt safest with.”

She grabbed a washcloth from the shower rack. “Your brother is not an easy man to resist.”

Essa lifted the declaration with humor, was relieved when Bethany laughed.

“The two of you were always combustible, Es.” Bethany drawled. “Damned revolting for a sister to have to see.”

Essa laughed. “I can imagine. You think I enjoyed watching you moon over Fin in the beginning? I was worried you were going to break his heart.”

The water turned from cool to icy. Essa lingered beneath it as she washed, face turned into the spray, throat rumbling with sounds of appreciation caught somewhere between a groan and a purr. Thanks to Bethany’s initial healing and her body’s violent rejection of her overindulgence, she was starting to feel somewhat like at least one of the more familiar versions of herself.

“Like you and Garrett?” Bethany asked a tad sharply. “Or you and Cullen? No offense, love, but I don’t think you get to throw those particular daggers.”

Essa shut the water off.

“Garrett’s heart needs to deal with his own extra-Essa issues, and you know it.” She stuck one hand out, waited patiently for Bethany to give her a towel. “He knows it too. And maybe I wished a little too much for what might have been if we’d been not quite who we are, but we’ll always come right back to where we were.”

She wrapped the towel around her hair. “With him willing to die for me and not willing to kill me. We’re both fire, Beth. He makes me destructive, makes me flare bright enough to scorch the heavens.”

Essa’s rubbed her eyes. “I’m tired of burning out of control.” She muttered. “Permanently. Fucking. Tired.”

Bethany pulled the curtain back, met Essa’s gaze with a stubborn lift of chin. “About time you said it, Essa Trevelyan.”

“What?” Essa blinked at her.

“About time,” she repeated. “I always told Garrett that there were two Essa’s. Cottage Essa and Kirkwall Essa.”

Essa frowned it made sense enough; she often viewed herself the same way, but she hadn’t expected anyone else to make those associations. “What?” she asked again.

“Kirkwall Essa,” Beth lectured with brutal pragmatism. “Died over a year ago, and as far as I know, Garrett’s libido was the only one who missed her.”

Essa’s eyes went wide and suddenly she was laughing.

“We like this one,” Beth said, offering her hand when Essa’s levity nearly stole her footing.

She’d been so worried that her cover had slipped, that she had lost the thick skin she needed to do what had to be done. “You like…this one?”

Bethany rolled her eyes. “I dare say that we love her.” She handed Essa another towel, fluffy and pink. “We’ve decided—collectively—to exile you from Kirkwall.”

“You…what?”

“Arms up.” Bethany leaned forward to wrap the towel around her while Essa gaped, annoyingly fish-like, at the top of her head. “Varric can make that happen, you know, but now that you’ve a new job, there’s no reason for you to involve yourself in this place. See the missions through, retire with a fat check that we all know the Inquisition is good for. We’ll come see you at Seaside. The rails are still working fine.”

Bethany pressed one of Essa’s hands to the top fold of the towel. She held the ends together obediently. “The one on my head is pink too isn’t it?”

“Of course.” Bethany’s grin was just a little mean. “But don’t worry, the clothes I have for you aren’t.”

*

Bethany’s apartment—every shade of rose and leaf and sunlight—reminded Cullen so much of his grandmother’s parlor that he half-expected his nana to come in at any moment, carrying a basket of peas to shell from the garden and complaining about his grandfather’s muddy boots by the front door.  There were tatted doilies on the dark end tables, lamps with pale pleated shades and lightbulbs that cast bright and gold against soft green plaster. The double windows on the far wall were draped in yards of creamy lace, the dull grey streets beyond obscured by frosted window panes. Outside, the temperature had dropped and the snow had returned, blanketing everything in silence.

“You fallen into the flora yet, Curly?” Varric called from the open kitchen behind him. He had spread his work out on the white cottage table, seemed content to write away the hour Bethany and Essa had been in the bathroom.

“Hardly,” Cullen chuckled. He sat on one end of a rolled-arm, overstuffed burgundy and green plaid sofa, and if the crisp lines of his dark suit were utterly at odds with the space, he was still comfortable. “A bit homesick, truth be told.”

Varric laughed, muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “Fereldans” as he went back to his work, leaving Cullen to the anatomy textbook he had snagged from Bethany’s coffee table. He had read exactly six pages, while trying to ignore the snatches of conversation he could hear over the running water and decidedly  _ not _ thinking about Essa being in love with Garrett Hawke, but when Essa had begun talking to Bethany about him, Cullen had given up, unabashedly listening as her words—both worrisome and encouraging—lifted above the water.

“I’ll be fine,” Essa said, voice louder as the water shut off. “Now it’s just nightmares. I’m used to that.”

“But these are new,” Bethany pointed out worriedly.

“I know.”

He had tried to tell Cassandra that Essa needed more time to recover after Haven—not that they had such time to give. Essa’s bones may have mended—they’d put their best healers on her as often as she could stand the attention—but she was exhausted. Who wouldn’t be? The average mortal would have still been in the hospital, or headed for the psychiatric wards. Not Essa. She was rescuing damsels, and decorating her apartment for Satinalia. No big deal.

The door to the bathroom opened a crack, and Bethany’s laugh drifted out ahead of the fading steam.

“I changed my mind,” Essa hissed. “I am not going out there like this.”

“Essa,” Bethany would need a much sweeter tone if she was attempting to be cajoling, Cullen thought, watching for glimpses of movement as the door slowly opened a few inches farther. “You were in a tavern not an hour and a half ago wearing a nearly see-through men’s undershirt and a pair of too big flannel pants.  _ This _ may as well be Chantry robes.”

“Maybe on you,” Essa snorted, and Cullen could hear them jostling back and forth in the open doorway. “You’re like Cari,” she continued to grumble. “All elegant, demure lines. In something like this, I just look like sex.”

“You do. Not,” Bethany sighed, clearly offended on behalf of whatever she had wrangled Essa into wearing. Her voice held the exasperation of a long exchanged argument. “Now, come on. You need food and sleep. Train leaves at sunrise.”

There were the small sounds of a scuffle before the door opened fully.

“Fine.”

Cullen put his book down, turned to watch Essa stalk through to the kitchen, a swathe of ivory silk billowing out behind her. She grabbed the door to the refrigerator, yanked it open with a menacing hug and stared inside as if its contents were single-handedly responsible for all her troubles. The healing and the shower had done her a world of good. She was steady on her feet again, color warm, the shimmering fall of her borrowed peignoir all but glowing against her sun-bronzed skin. Her eyes were shadowed still, but flint—finally—instead of smoke.

Whatever storms she had been floundering in, she was coming out the other side.

“Not a word, Varric,” Essa snarled without looking at him. “I may be drained, but it’d only take the teeniest spark….”

“And I bet I can manage.” She snapped her fingers, waved her hand toward the table full of paper.

Cullen cleared his throat, but would never be able to recall what he in the Void he was going to say. Essa’s glance darted across the room, collided with what he could only hope was not a slack jawed stare.

“Not a word from you either,” she added.

Essa had been wrong when she told Bethany that she look like sex, but even without the sharp look of warning from Varric, Cullen knew better than to say so. She was beautiful, otherworldly. The pale silk set off the richness of her hair, made the known warmth of her skin an indescribable lure, but she also looked dangerous, eyes sharper than her sneer, a siren who watched impassively as the foolhardy dashed themselves to pieces on hidden shoals.

And Cullen had never seen her look more uncomfortable in her skin.

“Go lie down.” Bethany followed in Essa’s wake, tried to pull the handle of the refrigerator from her grasp.

“You need rest,” she repeated, bumping Essa with her hip until Essa unbalanced, glaring as she tripped on the long hem of her robe. “I’ll scramble you some eggs.”

“Just crack them in a glass,” Essa countered, passing Bethany the carton. “I’ll just—“

“Ew. No, you will not,” Bethany’s closed her eyes with a delicate shudder. “Rutherford, come make yourself useful. I’ve been told you can cook.”

Cullen didn’t miss Bethany’s smirk as he crossed into the kitchen to Essa. He could only guess he still looked a little starstruck. Essa tended to have that effect on him. Especially fresh from a shower with water gleaming and hair slicked back from the scowling angles of her face.

“Here.”

Cullen took the carton, reached past the pair crowded in the open door of the fridge. He grabbed a quart of milk, arm grazing Essa’s shoulder, silk sliding and catching against his suit jacket. She flinched, but not before she started to lean back against him.

“Bethany, you have flour?”

She nodded, scooting away with a knowing look to leave him and Essa alone in the too-small space.

“Good.” He moved to the counter, began placing the items by the stove. “If you’ll get that for me, along with a fork, a bowl, and a pan, I’ll make pancakes.”

“Bethany.” Essa’s immediate entreaty was the first sign of her usual humor. “For love of the Mabari, tell me you have syrup.”

“I do.”

“I could kiss you both,” Essa teased, and for a moment, she looked as if she might hug him. Instead, she wrapped both arms around her torso, hiding in her own embrace.

Cullen turned back from the stove.

“You have mean friends,” he decided, and while he was all for a little well-deserved needling, enough was enough.

Bethany turned to him affronted, but Cullen was already moving past her. Essa watched his approach warily, chin lifted, eyes narrowed like visor slits but somehow less vulnerable even with her uncharacteristic posture.  He stopped too close. The cascade of silk brushed the tops of his shoes, and she glowered at him, placed one hand on his chest as if to push him away.

“I’m a mean woman.”

Her lips were surly—he wanted to kiss them until she smiled again—but then Cullen loved her face in all its mercurial expressions, had found that he could watch her for hours, trapped in the endless drift of her gaze from smoke to flint to starflame. He had lost more time than he should admit searching for constellations on her cheeks, following winding paths to the crooked bridge of her nose, and hoping for some glimpse of the future as he charted in her eyes the ascendance of wonder and doubt and daring. His fingertips knew by heart the scattered trail that plunged from the sharp edge of her jaw to the broken dust on her shoulders, and he knew the cluster high on her right hip that looked like Judex.

“You look like a dream,” he murmured while she stared up at him, questions grey and hard, brittle like underworked steel.

“You have strange dreams,” she whispered.

Cullen reached for the satin belt tied at her waist, hands slow, waiting for permission even knowing that she couldn’t guess what he was asking for. He raised one brow just to goad her, didn’t hide the first brush of a grin when she glared at him. Essa liked trust games and if they were going to play at anything, maybe it was time they started on those.

“Alright.”

She lifted her arms slightly away from her body, in surrender or challenge, Cullen couldn’t be sure. The scratch of Varric’s pen stopped, and silence slid abruptly into the kitchen, stole breaths and all memory of laughter, left loud and jarring the ambient sounds of appliances and the _tick tock_ of Bethany’s mantle clock.

“Ridiculous isn’t it?” she murmured, nerves tinting the breathless query as he pulled the loose knot free.

The silk was cool, ephemeral as the night that waned beyond the falling snow. Essa’s fingers curled into her palms when Cullen reached to draw the fabric like water from her shoulders.  The gown beneath was sleeveless  and shorter than the shirts she liked to sleep in. The sheath of ivory lace and sheer chiffon tantalized with shadows, and he knew without asking that this was the garment she hated. Cullen had to fight not to rip it from her in annoyance. Essa Trevelyan did not belong in shadows. If anything, she had been among them for too long.

“Maybe a bit,” Cullen replied.

He shrugged out of his jacket, eyes never leaving hers. The wool bunched at his left hand, and he realized he still held the robe.  Cullen dropped it to the floor, only remembered that they weren’t alone with Bethany hissed in indignation. Essa smiled, gaze shrewd and a little sympathetic.

“Try this.” He slipped the jacket onto her arms, tugged it briskly into place before buttoning it up completely. The dark wool hit her mid-thigh, left only a wisp of lace showing at collar and hem. Her shoulders relaxed beneath weight.

“Better?” Cullen asked, rolling the sleeves partway up her forearms.

Essa’s lips twisted into a smile he couldn’t read. “Better,” she nodded.

He leaned in to place a chaste kiss on her temple. She smelled like lilacs and cold ashes. Bethany was right. She needed to be exiled from Kirkwall.

“Train leaves at…?”

“6:14,” Bethany offered helpfully. “You going with her?”

Cullen searched Essa’s face. “If she wants me to.”

She opened her mouth, and the cant of her smile had him so certain that she was about to acquiesce.

“Do you think?” Essa asked instead, breath a tumbling in a rush of uncertainty against his chin. “That you can love more than one person?”

Cullen paused, body still yearning toward the warmth of her, heart pounding against his suit jacket as he turned the question over in his head. At the table Varric cleared his throat, was no doubt about to say something profound and wise and poetic.

“Of course you can.” Cullen whispered a kiss across her cheekbone. “Whoever told you love was finite?”

She blinked up at him in astonishment. “Really?”

Cullen smiled. “Really, but unless you want this conversation turning up in one of Varric’s books, maybe we should wait and have it on the train?”

“Bad form, Curly,” Varric complained. Essa’s lips twitched as she stepped away from Cullen, hips rolling with her usual swagger. “But I don’t suppose you’re completely hopeless.”


	4. It's a Start

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With so much behind them, Cullen and Essa finally find that not everything has changed. The best remains.

Dawn shimmered on the horizon, flowed in rainbow auroras over the snow that still blanketed the passing countryside.  Kirkwall was only just falling behind them, the city a growing shadow beneath the melt. Essa’s eyes were forward and away toward Seaside and further onto Ostwick where she hoped to find some answers about at least part of the nightmares she had been having. Had she been more certain of either of them, she might have reached for the hand of the man who sat across the small, private compartment from her. More and more she found herself facing her longing for a future with Cullen in it, but there were still so many doubts.

The train hummed around them, beneath them, dark metallic energy poised and building steam. Essa pressed one hand against the window sill, let the low vibrations travel up from the carriage into her arm. Their direction was already chosen, foreordained, as long as disaster didn’t wait in the turns, but the iron beast slid forward patiently, despite thundering anticipation Essa darted a furtive glance across the compartment to Cullen, felt the same tight coil of expectation in her chest and wondered if they were as inevitable.

What had they really had? Great chemistry sure. The sex had been…well she couldn’t come up with an adjective that didn’t sound absolutely ridiculous, but if she was being honest—and she’d been exiled from Kirkwall, so if she couldn’t be honest now, when could she?—Essa would have admitted that everything about her affair with Cullen had been transformative. If not for him, she would never have run back to the ring, never have faced how she felt about Garrett, never realized how she felt about herself. It seemed silly, and by the Mabari, she didn’t want to give the man too much credit for the major upheaval of her life, but Cullen was right. Everything had changed.

Because nothing had.

She had known it when he caught her, arms steady and reverent, as if the only tangle of uncertainty was hers. She had been utterly assured when he kissed her, with lips that held the same daring tenderness from before their secrets scattered the shrapnel of both their hearts. It hadn’t made sense, that he could hold the reality of her in the same reverent hands with which he had held her dreams. Of course she had run. Again.  But not back to Garrett as Varric had accused. She’d gone back to  _ the Hanged Man  _ because that was the only place in the whole blighted city where she knew who she was—masks, shadows, secrets and all—and she had needed to look at where she was long and hard, and apparently through too much whiskey, to figure out where in the Void she was going.

“If you want to try to catch some sleep,” Essa offered, not quite ready to look at him. “There’s time. Passenger trains run slower than Seanna, you should have almost an hour.”

Bethany and Fin had woken them just before sunrise and no one but Essa had seemed surprised that she had slept soundly for hours on Bethany’s couch, belly full of pancakes and head on Cullen’s shoulder.  She had snored, Fin had been only too happy to inform her, his grin crinkling the corners of eyes the color of summer sky.

Cullen had refused to accept her apology.

“I’m fine.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, offered her a hesitant smile that she failed to return.

There were so many answers she had promised him; she couldn’t blame him for wanting them, could only appreciate his patience.

“I suppose I should start at the beginning,” Essa said, staring at their reflection in the train window.

Fin had brought her clothes early that morning and she was finally put back together, hair curled beneath a navy trilby, grey suit bearing just the thinnest blue pinstripe. Cullen wore charcoal—the color so common on him it might have been a uniform—silk tie a vivid line of matte crimson against a stark white shirt. The Inquisition insignia floated small and golden against his lapel. Essa wore no such brand.

“How long is the trip to Ostwick?” Cullen asked.

Essa chuckled. “Not the beginning of everything, and about three hours.”

Once he had agreed to go with her, Essa had splurged on the extra space. With any luck, she would have the book she needed before lunch and they could catch Seanna’s afternoon train back to Seaside.

Cullen nodded, turned from his own contemplation of the scenery to give her his undivided attention.

“Are you going to tell me why we’re going?”

“That’s hardly the beginning.” Essa’s smile felt weak; she longed for even an ounce of his rarely lost composure.

“Alright.” His gaze was as open as she had ever seen it, eyes warm as pale sunlight, lips soft. “It can wait.”

His stubborn chin lifted in what might have been encouragement, might have been challenge. He was still holding his coat and hat; his fingers slid along the narrow brim before he caught her watching him and set the fedora aside. Essa stared at her shoes.

“I told you that Garrett and I were lovers.” She didn’t wait for him to answer before stumbling on. “Started out near enemies. Hate sex.”

Cullen’s brows rose in query and Essa’s lips twitched as she fought a smile at the blush he couldn’t hide. 

“We fought well together though, made a good team, helping with the Underground. We got a number of mages out and to safety once the disappearances started.”

And even now, she would take their locations to the pyre. Essa pulled her legs up onto the cushioned berth beside her.

“You were working with Hawke and Anders?” Cullen asked in surprise.

“Not Anders,” Essa replied quickly. “At least not as far as I knew. He was always a point of contention between us. Garrett knows if I ever see him, I’ll turn him over to Aubreg.”

She glared into the distance, watched the cliffs rise up against the sky and almost missed the reflection of Cullen’s astonishment.

“Garrett should have killed him when he asked,” she muttered.

“When he…?” Cullen frowned in consternation.

Essa shook her head. “Not my story to tell,” she said, taking off her gloves and fidgeting with the smooth, dark leather. “It was always a problem for us, my knowing that if I ever fell to my demons, Garrett wouldn’t put a bullet between my eyes.”

Cullen flinched, and she met searching amber with a flat stare.

“I’m a mage,” she reminded him, because she knew it was too easy to forget.

Cullen opened his mouth to speak only to shut it abruptly, as if he had found somewhere in her face the answer to whatever he had been about to ask.

“I know you are.”

Essa lifted a brow, but he waved for her to continue.

“We were friends by the end. Hard not to be, I guess,” she shrugged. “Though I don’t think either of us realized it until we were in far too deep. About a year ago, we were moving a group of magelings, kids not much younger than Nadie. Just happened to be one of the nights the brass tried to raid Merdrat’s warehouses, and someone had tipped off the Order about us. The docks were crawling with brass and reds …”

She would never forget that night, the smoke, the sirens, the damned fog rolling thick and oppressive from the bay, somehow worse when the lighthouse cast its gaze upon them, bright banks of dingy, suffocating light. The city had snapped at them, bullets and shadows and death waiting on behind every flagging stride.

“We were putting the last of them on the boat when one of the reds got close enough to do some damage. The warning shot caught me across the hip.”

She trailed her fingers over soft wool. Cullen’s lips had lingered more than once on the ragged scar. She watched recognition blaze, honey-dark in his eyes.

“He called Hawke’s name and there was something about the way he held his gun...” Essa’s voice went soft with remembrance. “As if that 9 mm was suddenly too heavy and the only way he could hang on was to lighten the load. His arm was steady though. I knew he wouldn’t miss, but it wasn’t a clear shot. I don’t know many who would have taken it without some serious personal motivation.”

Essa took a slow breath, tried to ease the tightness around her heart. She twisted her gloves in her hands, turned her face to the sun, tried to believe that Kirkwall was finally behind her.

“Which we had too, and more besides.” She reached up, yanked her hat from her head in a fit of impatience, ran one hand through the tangles left behind.

“Bethany had fallen earlier carrying one of the girls, twisted her ankle badly enough that Garrett had been half carrying her over the wet concrete. The kids were crying, those tiny little sounds of terror, like they were too afraid and too exhausted to make a sound…I’d never seen a kid afraid like that, but I was once. When all that’s left is the certainty that you’ll never be safe again…”

She sighed, took a shaky breath. “I just…I lost it.” She swallowed hard, cleared her throat and stared past the shock she could see brightening his eyes. “I called my fire between us. I don’t think it’s ever answered so quickly, just this wall of—”

“Bright blue flame,” Cullen interrupted her, words scarcely above a whisper. “And just before it closed completely between us, I put a pair of bullets in Garrett Hawke’s chest.”

*

Silence filled the compartment, heavy and cold, a thousand brutal winters. Essa’s hat tumbled to the floor between them and Cullen’s heart kicked hard in his throat as her eyes flashed once before they closed, tighter than the fists in her lap. He had not seen that searing azure since that night, but it was not a shade of fury he would ever forget.  It burned in his dreams as it did now against the backs of her eyelids

“Say that again,” she said softly, jaw clenched, teeth barely allowing the words past her lips as magefire cast bright the delicate web of veins above her lashes.

He would never have imagined that the mage from that night was Essa. Though now, he didn’t see how he could have missed it. The woman from the docks and been a blazing tempest, hair tangled by wind from the sea, eyes a scream of blue. She had stared through him as if she knew his every fear, his every fury, but in her face there had been such purity of purpose she might have been Andraste herself. 

And his conviction had failed him. Utterly.

“The templar from that night…It was me.” The confession was leaden. It fell into space between them and Cullen reached for the back of his neck, shocked to feel some of the tension he had long carried ease.

Essa flinched at the sudden movement. Heat curled from her hands, clear waves distorting the air above her knuckles and choking the still confines of the train compartment. Cullen pressed his elbows back against the upholstered seat, moved his hands farther away from his gun.

“Essa.” He drew a slow breath, reminded himself that he wasn’t helpless. Cassandra had been working with him for a year now, showing him what abilities he still held even without lyrium to amplify that power.

“Give me a second.” Her nostrils flared, but her voice was calmer than he expected.  “This is either the worst thing I’ve ever heard, or the funniest, and I won’t know how I feel until it sinks in.”

“The funniest?” Cullen demanded, unable to hide his indignation. That night had changed the trajectory of his entire life, destroyed completely the crumbling edifice of his convictions.

“Yes, the funniest.” All breath and heat left her in a rush. “Oh, sweet Mabari.”

When she opened her eyes they were cool and grey. Her voice wavered, caught between laughter and tears. “Cullen…if you hadn’t shot Garrett, I would never have known I loved him.”

She covered her mouth with one hand, stared at him through helpless amusement and the morning’s persistence.

“You—What?” Cullen gaped at her, tried again. “What?”

And then she was laughing in earnest, face buried in her hands, body folding in half with the force of her guffaws.

“I’m sorry.” There was an edge of hysteria to the apology she gasped out between chortles and Cullen almost felt guilty for glaring so furiously at her. Almost. She hardly seemed cowed by his ire. Another reason he was so blighted fond of the woman. “But, oh, Maker, it’s laugh or rage, and I just don’t have the energy for anger.”

The magic that answered her so easily suggested otherwise, but Cullen didn’t gainsay her. She lifted her face and Cullen tracked the paths of a pair of teardrops as they slid down her freckled cheeks.

“You changed my life,” she said, more seriously. “All our lives, really…and for you, a year later, to be the reason Garrett and I were wreaking further havoc…”

She covered her mouth with her hands and for a moment her gaze shimmered toward something darker, sadder.  She uncoiled, muscles loose and movements slow as she rose to her feet.

“I promised myself I would kill you, you know.” She seemed to think better of her position, paced by him carefully.

“I’m sorry,” she added apologetically. “I can’t be still.”

Cullen reached down to snatch her hat from the floor.

“Thank you.”

Essa’s shoulders were curved inward, strides short. She had perhaps two before the short length of the compartment forced her to turn. The floor that trembled beneath her feet as the train continued its boundless chug toward Ostwick.  Cullen offered a stabilizing hand, but she dodged, body curving away from him as she crowded to the far side of the small aisle between their benches, calves bumping the seat she had abandoned. He thought she was trying to appear nonthreatening, felt some small measure of her earlier hilarity at that impossibility.

“For months I tried to figure out who had been on the docks that night.” The train shuddered, a laborious surge forward as it began the climb up to the headland. Essa rocked her back on her heels and nearly fell into his lap. “But I never could. I guess now I know why.”

Aubreg had taken over then, and Cullen had left the Order to join Cassandra’s Inquisition. His records had been sealed tighter than Merdrat’s shipping schedule.

“I’m sorry.”

He was, but even then Cullen wasn’t sure what he should be apologizing for. She was right. That night had changed all their lives, his included. He had dropped the shot, chastised himself even as he squeezed the trigger, knowing his bullets wouldn’t strike anything vital, but Garrett had moved, so impossibly fast that Cullen would have accused him of magic if he hadn’t known better, and the second shot hit him just left of center chest.

Cullen had been certain that he had killed him, and on top of every doubt, every regret, he had killed the Champion of Kirkwall.

“I fell back immediately.”

She turned toward him in surprise, reaching for the handrail that ran the length of the overhead compartment just above him to keep from falling. Her legs hit his and Cullen made room for her between his knees, wasn’t quite able to believe that blush he saw on her cheeks as she stared down at him.

“I called for an ambulance.” Her body hung before him, shins pressed against the seat, weight held on her arms, and for a moment all he could think of was catching her hips with his hands, pulling her into his lap. “Officer down.  Anything to get them moving faster. We searched everywhere, but by the flames died down, the docks were empty. I left the Order that night. Never looked back.”

He watched sunlight move across her face, followed the sharp square of her jaw to her cheekbone and then up. She closed her eyes.

“The boat shoved off, kids safe enough with the people the Lady of Iron had sent. I still don’t know how I got Beth and Garrett to a car. She was injured, all of her focus on just keeping him alive. Thank the Maker I was at peak. Not soft like I am now.”

Cullen stared at her.  She held her body taut against the motion of the train, defying so much forward momentum. “Soft?”

Essa smiled, a fledgling that couldn’t quite make the flight to her eyes. “Comparatively.” 

She pushed off again, paced back and forth twice before she sighed. He waited, wondering how much she would tell him, how much she needed him to know.

“By the time we reached the cottage, the night reeked of elfroot and lyirum. Beth was out of both and shaking, and I…well, I’m a shit healer…I’ve told you that, but Maker I tried. Anything Beth asked of me.”

She cleared her throat roughly. Cullen reached out and took her hand and for a moment she stopped, as if she had forgotten he was there.

He tugged gently. “Sit with me.”

“What?”

“Sit with me,” he said again, command low, almost a request but for the seriousness behind it.

Essa eyed him warily, then sank onto the seat beside him, a sliver of space left between them.

“Please continue.”

She scowled at him and Cullen hid a smile when she pulled her hand away. He was catching up now, seemed to be finding his feet a little faster than she was. He was honest enough to admit he appreciated the rarely held advantage.

“Dennett helped me get us all in the house, kept watch, got water and food in us, held the light when Beth had to resort to modern medicine she hadn’t learned yet.”

She shook her head, stared down at her shaking hands as if they were still covered in blood. Cullen couldn’t stop the small sound of distress that rumbled from his throat.

“You meant to shoot me,” she reminded him quietly.

“I did.”

He had meant to wound, to disrupt her magic, to buy himself some time to think. Taking in the Champion of Kirkwall would have been problem enough, but he couldn’t have just let them go. There were mages disappearing and he had just caught Hawke with two adult apostates attempting to smuggle who knew how many children out of the city.

“But you weren’t trying to kill me.” She reached across the aisle, snagged her gloves from the seat.

“No.” Cullen brushed a fingertip beneath her chin, pulled her focus for a heartbeat. “I wasn’t.”

“I knew it.” Essa sat up, pulled her gloves back on with short, terse movements. “Damn you, Garrett Hawke.”

She stared past Cullen at the window. “I never forgave him for taking those bullets.” Essa bit her lip. “You really left the Order that night?”

Cullen nodded. “I had been considering it for some time. But—“ He rubbed the back of his neck, tried to find the words to explain what had taken him months to figure out. “I don’t know that I’d ever really seen myself in someone else’s eyes until that night.”

Essa placed one hand on his arm. The warmth of her sank deep, past leather, wool, and cotton, settled somewhere beneath his skin, where he knew he would always carry her.

“And I left the Hawkes.” She sighed. “Soon enough thereafter anyway. Left the ring. Got deeper in with Cari and Merdrat and made too little progress in the year that followed.”

She was closer, though Cullen didn’t recall her moving. The outside of her thigh was pressed to his and she frowned down at the meeting of charcoal and steel, as if she realized the intimacy at the same moment he did.

“And then you went back,” Cullen prompted, before she could put distance between them.

“I did.” Essa’s fingers tightened briefly on his arm. “After we broke one another’s hearts and my usual methods of managing my demons failed me.”

“Your usual…” She started to sit back, but Cullen was faster. He placed one hand over hers, held her still until she met his eyes.

“I’ve told you a little.” She jerked one shoulder as if none of it mattered. “Rage, desire. I have a temper, Cullen, and an inconvenient sex drive. Bethany says there are herbs and medicines that might help, but they sound too much like tranquility for my taste. Meditation helps, and fighting. For a long time sex was the easiest way. Took care of both.”

“You and Garrett?”

Essa nodded, seemed not to take offense to a question so many others would have found intrusive.

“It was—“ She glowered at him. “Don’t make this a competition. I’ve heard how people are.”

Cullen held up both hands, lip hitching toward a smile at the way she said “people,” as if they were another species from her.  “I wouldn’t. And if I ever do, it’s the lyrium withdrawal talking.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Paranoia, jealousy, anxiety, depression.”

She tilted her head at his candid recitation, the gesture so close to that of Greta and Soldier than Cullen felt himself grinning despite the heavy topic.

“I’ve been luckier than most, but these are all possible symptoms. Nightmares, waking terrors, memory loss, fatigue…I could go on. Wouldn’t you rather me tell me about your sex life?”

His query shocked a bark of laughter from her. Essa covered her mouth with her hand again, let go of his arm to pop him with a gentle, playful fist.

“You’re a terrible man.” Essa muttered through her fingers. Cullen grinned as she popped him again. “Completely incorrigible.”

“I am,” he agreed mildly. “I’m told you should watch the quiet ones.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Fine,” she huffed. “But we’re coming back to you.”

The ferocity of her intent warmed him through and Cullen slipped his arm around her without thinking, could only marvel that when she yielded against him, head on his shoulder as she had slept the waning hours of the night. Her arms slipped around his waist, one hand tunneling between his jacket and shirt, forearm lying warm and solid above his belt.

“Are you really sure?” she asked, lips against the drum of his heart. “After all that we…”

“I wouldn’t be nearly so interested in everything about you,” Cullen murmured into her hair. “If I wasn’t sure about how much I want you. That hasn’t changed. Everything else has, but that, Essa Trevelyan, hasn’t changed.”

It was as close to a promise as he would allow himself.

“Has it changed for you?”

“Wouldn’t that be convenient?” Essa chuckled. “No. That hasn’t changed.”

She burrowed closer and Cullen let out a breath he felt he must have been holding for weeks.

“Funny,” Essa mused. “To think that I would never have loved either of you, if I hadn’t hated you first.”

Love. She said it so easily, and yet he knew that it wasn’t for her. They had talked about their childhoods, their families. Essa had grown up all but bereft of human bonds, and yet she clung as fiercely as any mabari to those she cared about.

“Did you mean what you said?” she asked. “About love not being finite.”

“I did,” Cullen pulled off his gloves, ran one hand through the tousled satin of her hair. “Did you think it was?”

“Maybe?” she leaned into his touch. “And don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

Cullen laughed as she forged ahead. “I mean, my family never seemed to have enough to go around. Da tried, and Cari once we were older, but really, for the longest time it was just me and Fin against the world. I was afraid I’d lose him when he took up with Beth, but so far…”

She shrugged, made a low rumble of pleasure when Cullen pressed his fingers against the tension in her neck. She wasn’t much better than he was.

“We’ve been alright.”

He pressed on a particularly tight knot and Essa’s hands closed into fists against his shirt, nails scraping against the cotton and raising a wake of goose flesh.

“You’ve never been in love before?” Cullen was a little impressed when the question emerged evenly.

“Is that a crack about my age?” she asked, voice relaxed and lazy.

Cullen smiled. “Hardly, we’re close enough to the same. It’s just…Maker’s Breath…even I was young and foolish once.”

“Impossible.” She lifted her head from his chest, stared at him in such disbelief that he laughed.           

“I was young and foolish too,” she admitted turning in his arms, fitting herself against him in that easy perfect way that they had known. “Didn’t quite fancy myself in love, Andraste be praised. But since I nearly burned him alive in his bed, I found such entanglements inadvisable. Hawke was…not on purpose. Neither were you come to that.”

“Me.” The single syllable was neither question nor statement but some wondering in between. She had said as much before, but—

“You may as well know,” Essa said, derailing his hesitance and wrapping one arm around his neck. “I’m absolutely crazy about you, and more afraid of that than dragons or nightmares or whatever new horror the Maker is waiting to inflict upon me.”

He swallowed, met her directness with his own resolution. “And you and Hawke?”

“I told you before there isn’t a ‘me and Hawke’.” She worried with the edge of his collar. “That hasn’t and won’t change. We’ve said our goodbyes…but…we’ll always be important to one another. Does that bother you?”

Her eyes were wide and guileless, as naked as he had ever seen her.

“Hawke will always bother me,” Cullen smirked. “But not for those reasons.”

Essa snickered. “Well, me too there. Is that it then?” With one hand she pulled out an imaginary notepad, mimed checking off a very long list. “Are there finally no secrets left waiting to destroy us?”

“You still,” Cullen breathed a kiss across her cheek. “Haven’t told me why we’re going to Ostwick.”

  
  



	5. An Elegant Chase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now expanded. Mysterious amulet in hand, Cullen and Essa race to the Winter Palace and find more than their enemy is more than just a drug dealer and assassin.

Ostwick was nearly forgotten by the time they arrived. Half an hour outside of the city, a message had come in across the wireless from Cassandra.  _ Halamshiral. ASAP. Tickets are waiting for you at the airport. 2:15. Will send a car. _

There was just enough time to take a cab from the train station to the Trevelyan estate, a great walled property with an impossibly large brick house, massive white columns and gleaming windows for which Essa felt no affection beyond the relief that it was blessedly empty; her parents were--as always--spending the holiday with her great aunt. A week of glittering parties and forced gaiety that Essa had avoided after the age of twelve, when her feral disposition had finally proven intractable enough that her parents stopped forcing her to go. The Maker’s sense of humor was not lost on her as she grabbed her saddlebags from the bottom of Cari’s closet, swiped a trio of dresses her sister hadn’t cared enough about to take to Kirkwall, and two pair of shoes.  

They were at the airport at half past one, Essa clutching the saddlebag that she had dared not yet open, Cullen obligingly hauling the two large leather suitcases Fin had brought to her at Bethany’s apartment early that morning and a lifetime ago. The day had turned bright and warm, and the snows that were even then melting in Kirkwall were nowhere to be found in Ostwick. The sun shone down through the skylights, cast the terminal in great squares of light and shadow.

In the unseen distance, the Winter Palace loomed.

“Wait, Cullen.” Essa wasn’t sure when she had fallen behind, but when he stopped and turned back to face her, he seemed just as surprised as she was that she wasn’t by his side. “Wait a second?”

“Of course.” They were almost to the gate and had plenty of time. “Are you alright?”

Essa nodded. “I just need—“ she took a breath. “It just sort of hit me.”

She gestured to the saddlebag on her shoulder, lifted the dress bag she carried over one arm, and nodded at the cases he carried.

“Except for the cottage and what’s there, this is everything I have in the world.” She shook her head in wonder. “There’s nothing left for me in Kirkwall....or Ostwick.”

Cullen smiled. “I was wondering when your exile would sink in.”

He, thankfully, said nothing of Ostwick.

“I mean there’s still people,” she added. “But…”

“But they’re mobile,” he finished for her. “And now if you ever go back it’ll be as a tourist.”

She nodded again in wonder. “I’m nearly free.”

“Nearly?”

“I just have to finish this up. Pay my debt to Cari. Stop whatever monster keeps tearing through my dreams.”

“And then what?” he asked, though she knew he wanted to ask her more about her dreams.

“I don’t know.” Essa’s grin broadened. “You got plans after we save the empress and put a stop to the red lyrium trade?”

He chuckled as she closed the distance between them. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t ambitious, Trevelyan.”

“I’m not,” she shook her head. “Not even a little bit. I just want to make it to the other side of whatever this is. Regroup at the cottage, spend a few weeks with the phone off the hook and figure out a life path that doesn’t end me up like my father.”

“Your father?” His eyes narrowed curiously.

“Took one too many to the face,” Essa said, face falling with a sad shrug. “Mind’s not what it used to be.” But that was a conversation for another time. “I don’t want that to be me.”

“You could try not taking everything on the chin,” Cullen offered helpfully. He set one of her suitcases down, reached to tug her in for a quick hug even as she mock glared at him. “I think I can clear my schedule for a few weeks by the sea.”

“Clothing is optional, by the way.”

He pressed a laughing kiss to her temple. “I figured.”

*

The flight to Halamshiral was quiet, uneventful but for the quiet sounds of unrest coming from the woman sleeping on his shoulder. Essa had dropped off almost the moment they reached altitude, both arms wrapped around his left. Cullen watched clear skies sail, bright blue and interminable, past the window on the other side of her. He could feel the magic coming from the bag in her lap, knew that whatever lay within was connected to the nightmares she’d had since Haven. Her eyes moved as she dreamed. The closer they drew to Orlais, the more fretful those dreams seemed to become.

She was edgy when she awoke, dangerous by the time they disembarked. Cullen watched her pull a mask—as empty and hard as any for all that it wasn’t real—down over her face as they collected their luggage. Maker’s breath, he hated Orlais. He reached up to rub the back of his neck, watched as Essa’s eyes dropped as cold and flat as when she stepped into the ring. Now he hated it more.

The car Cassandra had sent to collect them took them straight to the Winter Palace. Cullen spent the half hour ride reading over the briefing that had awaited them ignoring the way Halamshiral rose in near perfect economic tiers. They left more than the airport behind as they left the outskirts of the city. Wide avenues and manicured lawns soon replaced barren yards and leaning tenements. Peeling billboards and dented streets signs gave way to green parks and oak canopies and sculpted iron. It wasn’t any better than Kirkwall, he thought, as he watched a young elven woman scurry, head down, eyes furtive as she fled the side door of a sprawling mansion. Kirkwall was at least honest.

He turned back to his missive angrily. The masquerade had been extended forward by three days to include an impromptu Satinalia celebration in the honor of the empress’s auspicious by unexpected guests. Her cousins had arrived that morning and a surprise guest of honor would be arriving the next day. It was a security nightmare, and by the time he and Essa reached the guest wing that housed the Inquisition, Cullen had a one of the worst headaches he could remember.

“This,” he said by way of greeting as he strode across the well-appointed meeting room. “Is unacceptable.”

He slapped the file onto the table in front of Cassandra and Josephine, glanced down at where Leliana sat tucked into a high-backed chair and the only shadows in the dark-paneled room.

“Yes,” Essa drawled from the door, hauling in the bags he had dropped in his haste. “Completely inexcusable. It’s as if the Empress of Orlais thinks she can do whatever she pleases. I’m shocked,” she added in a voice that suggested she was anything but.

She had, of course, listened to him rant for at least half the ride.

“Does no one appreciate the gravity of this situation?” Cullen demanded while Cassandra and Josie looked past him, smiled and offered hellos to Essa as she closed the door behind her.

“We do,” Cassandra said, reaching out to retrieve the file. She passed it to Josephine who shuffled it back into her ever-present stack. “And while you two were off to Ostwick for Maker knows what, we have been busy. Invitations to every event have been secured, as has a rotation for you, Leliana, and myself among the empress’s guard.”

Cullen glared at her, could only grunt his approval as he took the seat Cassandra kicked out for him.

“Good.” Essa shoved her bags to the side, closed the door behind her. “I have a feeling I’ll be busy elsewhere.”

Leliana glanced up, blue eyes sharp as winter. “You found what you were looking for.”

“I did.” She strode to the wet bar,poured herself a glass of cranberry juice and ginger ale before tossing the saddlebag across the room. It hit the table with a soft thwack, slid the last few feet to Leliana’s outstretched hand.

“This is what he wants?” the spymaster asked. 

Essa nodded.

“What who wants?” Cullen asked, pinching back the growing tension behind his eyes.

Essa leaned back against the bar. “Last surprise, I promise.” She smiled in apology. “There wasn’t time. There’s barely time now, if we’re all going to dress for dinner. I’m going to explain this once. Josie, take notes so you can tell the rest of the crew?”

“Of course.”

“You all know that after Haven I started having nightmares. Really vivid feeling ones. About the man who put the red lyrium into that dragon. In every dream I was fighting him, and in every dream he was after something. It was small, some sort of jewelry, and it glowed as green as the tears he ripped into the Veil.”

Cullen watched her in trepidation, suddenly, completely certain that he knew where she was going and that he wanted her to stop.

“I had trouble remembering them when I woke at Skyhold, but once we went back to Kirkwall, every nightmare was as clear as me standing here now,” she sighed, took a sip of her drink. “I finally recognized that bit of green.”

She nodded to Leliana. “I’ve had that book since I was a kid. It was my favorite. A story about a Dalish girl who mends a great rift in the sky, saves her world from the greed and ambition of a god slayer.”

“I remember that book,” Cullen said. “My sister Rosalie must have read it a hundred times.”

Essa’s smile was fleeting. “Me too. Remember the cover? The embossed image of the amulet she used?”

Cullen nodded and Leliana held up the book as Esas continued. “I think mine might be the real thing.”

“But that’s just a legend!” Cassandra’s exclamation drew their gazes as Leliana opened the bag, pulled out a heavy volume that had clearly seen better days. It was bound in worn leather, bore a heavy golden amulet just below the now unreadable title. The stone in the center glowed a bright, sickly emerald.

“Legends start from some gleaning of truth,” Leliana said softly.

“As you say,” Essa took a larger swallow of her drink. Cullen stared at her, emotions and temper a tumult rendering him almost speechless. “I think that whoever is moving red lyrium across Thedas and trying to kill the empress is the same whoever who wants that thing.”

Wait. What? Surely he hadn’t heard her correctly.

“So you brought it to them?” Cullen’s shout was absorbed by impeccable acoustics, the thick carpet beneath his feet and the upholstered walls only made him angrier.

“It’s bait,” Essa shrugged.

Maker’s breath! He turned toward the bar, had made it halfway to her before he realized his foolish intent. 

“I thought the empress was bait.”Cullen curled his hands into fists so he didn’t grab her and shake her.

“Sometimes a really big fish needs a bigger lure.” She lifted her chin.

“You’ve never fished a day in your life,” he accused.

She had told him so, lying on a blanket by the sea. He had promised to teach her.

“I know what I’m about.”

“You absolutely,” Cullen retorted. “Do not.”

*

Essa did, in fact,  _ not _ know what she was about. But she would eat his hat, grilled, with a side of potatoes, before she admitted that fact to anyone. Her heels skidded once in the wet and Essa cursed her vanity for not being able to resist impractical things. They were ruined now anyway and had their protection not been considerably better than running down some of the questionable streets of Halamshiral, she would have tossed them into the nearest dumpster and been done with them. She glanced back over her shoulder, breath coming fast, gaze narrowed through the cold persistence of the street lights.

She had to be close to the palace now.

The streets were empty, more dark than light, and banks of mist roiled upward, propelled by gouts of steam that rose through grates and manhole covers, curling from below the slick blacktop. Even knowing the action’s futility, Essa checked her guns. She might have done it for comfort, but she had spent her ammunition, both revolvers and the speedloader she had managed to smuggle beneath the tight bodice of her borrowed dress. Her sister had been right, enough artfully displayed cleavage and no one worried about what else you might have poured into too few yards of silk and lace.

Not that they had done her any good. If she survived her foolishness, Cullen and Cassandra might just kill her.

Essa watched, lips parted in a desperate grab for air, as a broad silhouette loomed beyond the glowing banks of rising fog. The light did not bring safety; it occluded more powerfully than shadows, muting the streets beyond into an insubstantial dream.

“Essa? What are you–?”

She spun toward him, useless weapon raised between them before she lowered it to her side, reaching with the other to check her mask.

“It’s fine,” Cullen chuckled, gaze drifting down her body in frank appraisal. “Though I hardly need to see your face to recognize you.”

She scowled at him, rapidly closing the distance between them. Any relief she might have felt at having finally made it to her destination was lost as the sound of footsteps finally pierced the fog behind her.

“Hush,” she mouthed the word, pressed the cool barrel of her .38 to his lips.

She wasn’t certain what it said of the man that he didn’t flinch. She nodded to the door behind him, a door she wouldn’t have seen had he not stepped outside for what she assumed was a much needed smoke. Cullen slipped his cigarettes back into his pocket and she sensed more than felt him reach for his gun.

Essa shook her head sharply, pushing him back toward the door. Her breasts were against his chest and she was certain he could feel her heart pounding too hard between them. She fumbled behind him, fingers grasping uselessly for the hidden catch of a stupid hidden door while heavy steps brought the shadows ever closer.

“Cullen, open the damn door.”

Her voice was shaking as she glanced back over her shoulder, watching heavier shadows seep toward the palace walls. The light above them flickered once before winking out, casting them to the mercy of the softly illuminated fog.

“Cullen—“

She heard the latch open, felt the muscles in his chest shift as he moved them to make room for the swinging door. Essa shoved them inside, caught the door in a desperate grasp, and pulled it shut behind them.

“What in the Void is going on?” Cullen demanded tersely, back pressed to the closed door as Essa glanced quickly around the long, narrow corridor.

He was still angry with her; the last two days at been an endless whirl of shining, happy falsehoods and there had been no time for apologies. She could feel the tension in the air between them, knew that she wasn’t the only one the Winter Palace threatened with unwanted memories.

A single dingy bulb hung bare above them and the next was too far away to offer much comfort.

“Where are we?” Essa returned sharply. It was too soon for relief, too soon to declare their safety. She grabbed his hand and towed him down the hall.

The door shook once behind them and his fingers tightened in hers.

“Shit,” Essa muttered. “Where are we?” she repeated.

“Servants corridor.” Cullen followed behind the sharp staccato of her strides. “Just off of the ballroom. Essa?”

“Later.” She knew he was tired of being told ‘later’, could only hope there would be a one. “Turn here?”

She caught his nod from the corner of her eyes and dared to breathe a little easier once they were out of the door’s line of sight. She released his hand, shoving aside the wet folds of her coat to slip her gun back into the holster on her thigh. Cullen kept pace, hand reaching for her elbow to steady her as she shrugged out of her coat, bundling the wet trench into a tight ball.

“I don’t think it saw you,” she whispered, offered a silent prayer that this was so as she rushed them through the umber gloom.

“It?” Cullen asked, voice pitched low in response to her quiet tone.

Essa shrugged. “Could have been anyone, or anything, I suppose. Dressed as dapper as anyone else here and wearing a mask.”

“Your nightmare.”  

Cullen’s hands caught her hips, adjusted with gentle grace her furious trajectory and took them around another corner.  Essa heels slipped on the concrete floor and she frowned; he caught her too easily.

“’Now in flesh appearing’.”

Her voice shook as she quoted the old Satinalia carol. Essa glanced back again, still terrified that they were being followed.

“I don’t think he’s back there,” she sighed, but her heartbeat had not slowed. “Yet. I need to clean up.”

She had to get back out into the ballroom and hope that a hundred whirling dancers would hide her among the moody gold notes from the band, the bright song of a dozen crystal chandeliers.

“Second door on the right,” Cullen said, nodding ahead of them. “A powder room for the maids.”

Essa blinked. “Do you have this entire palace mapped in that pretty head of yours?”

He smiled tightly. “I doubt it. But enough of this floor at least.”

He slowed her headlong charge and opened a narrow door, nudging Essa inside. She pulled him into the small, dark space with her, and pushed him back against the door. The lock snicked into place and Essa gave herself a single tremulous sigh of relief. Cullen’s arms came around her and for a too-brief moment she leaned her cheek against the fine wool of his tuxedo jacket.

“Listen out,” Essa said, turning to face the darkness of the room.

There was barely enough space for the two of them. With arms outstretched, Essa’s fingers grazed the walls adjacent to them. She felt her way to small sink, palm brushing a door knob along the way.

“Door?” she asked.

“Water closet.”

The answer was immediate and appreciated. She eased the door open a crack, felt around carefully, breath held, for the light switch.

“Light,” she warned, and then the small room was cast in murky yellow.  Essa wasted no time, stuffing her coat behind the base of the toilet, before stepping back out into the powder room. She shot a quick glance to where Cullen leaned, one ear close to the door.

“You found your villain,” he said as she finally turned to the small mirror above the sink. “I suppose it could be worse.”

“Yeah,” Essa winced, began yanking pins from her disheveled hair. “I could not have a mask to hide behind.”

She placed them between her teeth and pulled her mask from her face, laying it on the wide lip of the sink.

“Essa what the–?!” His soft exclamation gave her pause.

She spared her reflection a single bleak look, frowned at the heavy bruise forming around her right eye and purpling the rise of her cheek.

“Long story,” she said around the pins in her mouth as she attempted to—quietly—run enough water into the sink that she could smooth her hair into a something appropriate.  “One that will have to wait.”

Her hands were shaking with haste and she drew in a breath still stinging with adrenaline. She could feel his cross silence heavy as balm in the close confines as she combed wet fingers through her damp hair, twisted the lank curls into a sleek chignon.

“Better?”

She took his grunt as affirmation then stared down at her dress. She had fought for something she could move in, something with a long split skirt that she could tuck up in the thin rhinestone belt at her waist. The gown had served her well tonight, plunging décolletage aside. She unhooked the long fall of black silk, let it slide down her legs, grateful to see that it would hide her shoes. The suede was soaked, but the mud washed off with a bit of scrubbing and no one would notice anything amiss unless they were much closer to her feet than she wanted anyone anyway.

“Anything?” she asked, glancing toward the door.

Cullen shook his head and she secured the lace half mask back over her face.

“Presentable?”

“Not the word I would choose,” he said gruffly, offering her his arm.

“Nor I for you,” she reminded him. He had asked her the same earlier that evening, standing in Dorian’s smoking room, dressed for sin. She tried—and failed—to remember why they were putting work ahead of a few hours naked in her ridiculously large bed.

Essa offered him a fleeting smile and switched out the light. Her fingers settled in the crook of his elbow in the sudden dark and when he led her back out into the dimly illuminated corridor, she found herself blinking, glance darting—furtive, fearful again—back the way they had come.

She saw nothing beyond the heavier shadows.

“I can hear the music.”

“We aren’t far,” Cullen assured her.

Essa sighed and hurried forward, pulling them both toward the growing buzz of noise she had never expected to find a comfort.

*

The grand ballroom of the Winter Palace was easily three times the size of the main hall at Skyhold. Essa had found its utterly inefficient use of space almost personally offensive when first they arrived, but as she and Cullen slipped out of the servants’ corridor and into the glittering, sumptuous crowd, she was grateful. The panel door slid back into place seamlessly and they slid down the wall, losing themselves in a thick cluster of Empress Celene’s guests.

The rise and fall of voices poured thin and bright, like cheap whiskey over ice. Not that there was anything cheap here. She had never seen so many jewels. Diamonds and rubies shimmered with lustrous fire at slim throats and dainty fingers. Fur stoles and capes in soft, pearly greys, rare foxes and great cats of the north displayed as trophies of wealth. The attire was black and white, but like the Inquisition’s sash across Cullen’s chest, there were slashes of crimson throughout the ballroom. The empress herself wore an ornate beaded gown of scarlet, the silk gleaming like so many drops of blood against her fair skin.

Except for the Inquisition, everyone wore masks. Essa appreciated their defiance even if she could not join them in it.

“Watch it.”

The warning was sneered in soft Orlesian, and perfectly painted lips pressed in a pout against gold filigree. Essa dodged smoke curling from the woman’s long, slim cigarette holder with a rough apology, darted a glance back behind them to make certain they were still not being followed.

A high tinkle of fake laughter skittered down her spine and she shot the woman a glare before Cullen squeezed her hand, pulling her attention forward.

“Can you tell me anything now?” he asked voice low, a rumble of worry.

“Dark magister,” Essa said tersely, eyes scanning the crowd for any sign of the man she had watched tear a hole in the sky. “Bullets didn’t stop him, and I used every one I had.”

He glanced toward the low v of her neckline and Essa would have grinned if such mirth wouldn’t have attracted undue attention.

“Yes, even those.”

“How good of look did you get?”

“White dinner jacket, build a little broader than you, average height. Dark hair, black mask. Should have eighteen holes in his black and whites.”

“You’re certain you hit him?” Cullen backed her toward an alcove, but Essa spun away toward the elegant sea of dancers.

“Too conspicuous,” she whispered. “And no visibility.”

She scowled as his question finally registered. “Of course I hit him.” She pulled Cullen into the last turns of a waltz.

“I thought you couldn’t dance,” he murmured, sweeping her into the perfect frame of his arms.

Leliana and Josephine had taught him well. His carriage was impeccable, if a bit too polite for Orlais.

“I said I didn’t dance,” Essa corrected, allowing him to lead her in dizzying twirls around the dancefloor.  “And I meant, here among the silver spoons. You’re surprisingly light on your feet, Rutherford.”

The scar on his lip twitched, the only sign that he might have been enjoying himself.

“And you follow with more grace than I would have expected, darling.”

The endearment shivered close to her ear and Essa interrupted her desperate search through the crowd to spare him a glower. He knew precisely what his voice did to her. Cullen spun her out from him and she caught a glimpse of a half dozen men who might have been her perp.

“He could be anyone,” she sighed, feet returning her to Cullen’s almost embrace. “But I almost believe I gave him the slip. Is anyone looking too hard at me?”

“Besides me?” he asked.

“Not helpful,” Essa’s distracted gaze slowly found his.

“I know.” His eyes were warm on her face, admission drifting like smoke in the air between them as the band wound down the last graceful bars of the waltz.

Essa sank into a curtsy, a half smile tugging her lips. “It’s a good thing I don’t need you for surveillance,” she murmured, rising for the next dance. “A few more turns around the floor, ser, and I’ll consider us safe for the moment.”

A distinctive trio of notes followed the dancers’ polite applause and the band changed. A ripple of appreciation swept through the nearby spectators as the beat was quickly recognized. The lights over the floor dimmed, soft and sultry, and the familiar music rose like a warm Antivan wind.

“Oh, not this dance,” Cullen muttered, hand sliding from her waist as he headed for the edge of the dancefloor.

“Where are you going?” Essa hissed. “I said a few more turns.”

“This is not a dance I was taught,” he protested quietly, strides sharp, purposeful.

“But you’ve seen it?” She stalked after him, feet timed carefully with the heavy beat of the double bass.

“Well of course, it’s very…striking when performed by those with any skill.”

She caught his arm and he snapped back to face her. Essa flashed him a vicious grin, splayed one hand in the center of his chest, and pushed.

“It’s my favorite,” she admitted, as she sank down before him, leg extended in a fierce parallel just above the floor. “You’re doing fine, right now.”

Cullen caught her wrists, yanked her up as if she weighed nothing and she stepped toward him, forcing him back to escape collision.

“Just advance and retreat.”

He glared down at her, and she almost felt sorry for him without a mask to hide behind. She slid her foot between his, broke the wide, hostile stance with careful footwork, before he drove her back a handful of steps. She could see his clever mind working, eyes flicking over the other dancers as they moved across the floor, lost in their own conquests.

“But mostly.” She ran her hands up his arms, fingers grazing the back of his neck, dipping beneath his high collar as she arched toward him. “You stand there, looking as if you want to fuck me. Stoically.”

He grabbed her hands, pulled her against him and drove them both forward. His knee was between hers and when he lifted her, Essa’s thoughts fled. She remembered her steps only by some miracle, snapping one leg down toward the floor as he set her down.

“I. Do. Not. Fuck. Stoically.” He informed her between his teeth. He spun her hard, reeling her back in against him with a snap that left her leaning on him for support.

“Menacingly then,” she amended breathlessly, sliding like water down the front of his body before he dragged her back up ruthlessly.

“You wouldn’t take to menacing,” he whispered the words against her cheek. “But, Maker forgive me, Essa, when I finally get you in bed…”

He spun her in his arms, a full rotation before he pulled her back roughly against him. The layers of his tuxedo and her gown were but paltry illusions maintaining their separateness, and she melted against him, head falling back against his shoulder as he turned them both in a dizzying traverse across the gleaming white marble.

“Well…it doesn’t have to be a bed.” He twirled her away abruptly, and Essa lost her steps for a moment as his eyes met hers through the soft light. She rallied, stormed back toward him with the final swell of the music.

“Either way,” he smiled, let the open promise linger like a threat in his eyes as he caught the fury of her rush.

Cullen’s hand slid over her lifted knee, fingernails skimming bare skin behind the bend. Essa would forever insist that she had a pithy retort, but the music ended with a dramatic cessation and Cullen cast her toward the floor. She fell at his feet in a pool of shimmering black silk, mask pressed against his knee amid a scattering of applause.

Cullen chuckled and reached a hand down to her. “Surrender doesn’t suit you,” he said lifting her back to her feet.

Essa tried to hide a smile and failed. “Menacing might suit you a little.”

He laced their fingers together as he led her off the dancefloor, an automatic, too-habitual motion, and Essa tensed. The familiar clasp of their hands was suddenly too intimate to display on the grand stage of the Game. She pulled away with a little grimace of apology.

“Twenty minutes,” she said. “Get the others?”

He didn’t ask where to meet her. Between the two of them and Cassandra they had a dozen contingency plans.

“Be careful.” The order was cool, but for a heartbeat the full weight of the imploration lit his tawny gaze.

“You too.” Essa replied, as he blinked away the dangerous display of sentiment.

“I’m always careful,” he reminded her.

She wet her lips with her tongue, and was about to return the same when Cullen smiled.

“You’re a terrible liar.” He lifted his chin toward the main exit. “Go on. I’ll watch to see if you’re followed.”

 


	6. Dramatic Lighting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To put it as succinctly as Essa would: Sometimes people just need killing. We have one of those. tw: violence?

The room was dark, quiet. The only light was sparse, murky as it filtered through the open blinds from the courtyard to cast stripes of dusty gold in a long, slow climb up the curves of her body. She still wore her mask. The stretch of black lace brushed the tops of lips painted like crimson velvet. She looked untouched, untouchable, but Cullen knew that there were bruises beneath the artful fall of silk spilling in a wash of ink from the collar of sapphires at her throat. She wore the blue in defiance of Celene’s black and white ball, refused the elegant accents of ruby and scarlet everyone else had chosen in deference to the empress.  

The thin belt around her waist was a glitter of white fire and a wide, ornate cuff circled her wrist just below bracelet length sleeves of black lace.  Everything was paste, of course. The Inquisition wasn’t rolling in diamonds, nor were they likely to be with so many needs exceeding payment these days, but the sapphires were the real deal. She had swiped them in Ostwick from her sister’s closet, along with a gown the color of smoke.

“I would think you had looked your fill tonight,” Essa said, not straightening from a hip-tilted lean against the edge of a desk too dainty to be useful.

“I’ve been accused of being a slow mover.”

She lifted a short glass of whisky towards those perfect lips, hid a smirk behind the rim. The single chunk of ice rattled, shifted, fell toward her as if she were the source of gravity. She caught its sudden drop with the tip of her tongue, eased it back as she lowered the glass. Cullen watched the lines of her throat as she swallowed, tried not to think about how those muscles felt beneath his lips.

“Have you?” she asked, voice pitched low against the hum of the fan overhead.

He had, but not with her.

Cullen stepped farther into the room, closing the door to the parlor behind him. The others were waiting, but they could wait a bit longer. She was too quiet. Essa was dangerous enough when she was furtive, eyes moving like quicksilver, but this unnatural stillness after usually preceded bloodshed.

And he wasn’t through looking at her, not by a long shot.

The dress was almost demure. Long sleeves, longer skirt, black silk with just the barest sheen.  The sleeves were lace, the bodice fitted tightly through the torso. A thin keyhole ran the length of her sternum offering tantalizing glimpses of pale flesh and providing Essa with access to her extra ammunition.

“I told you earlier, I’m out of bullets.” She gave no further censure for his unapologetic gaze, instead lifting her glass in offering as he closed the final step between them. “Drink?”

She was staring ahead, eyes lost in the slatted play of light and shadow from the windows. Cullen took the glass from her hand without touching her and her gaze narrowed. He had all but fucked her on the dance floor in front of half the elites in Orlais, but now, now he was cautious. She glanced up, tracked the press of his lips to the lipstick kiss she had left on the rim. The liquor burned sharp as a sunburst at the back of his throat. It wasn’t as smooth as what she usually kept and he could only hope Josephine would find a polite way to let the Orlesians know that a Marcher had more expensive taste in whisky than they did.

“I’m surprised you bothered.” He returned the glass to her hand.

Essa shrugged. “Desperate times,” she murmured, finishing off the last sip. ”Besides, I’m supposed to be quitting. Remember?”

She set the empty glass on the desk behind her, and Cullen reached for it, slid it farther back from the edge. The toe of her shoe brushed his ankle.

“Give me your guns,” he ordered gruffly.

“Speedloader first.” She reached into the shadows of her bodice, retrieved a cluster of spent .38 casings.

Ingenious little device, one of the many advancements in weaponry to come out of the Blight. Of course so had semi-automatics. He would never understand Essa’s loyalty to her snubnosed revolver. It slowed her down, and for some unfathomable reason she always took the extra time to pocket her empty bullet jackets, which only slowed her down more. Her devotion to the outdated firearm was going to get her killed.

“You need a proper gun,” Cullen told her harshly, unable to hide his annoyance.

“I have a proper gun,” Essa replied, distracting him with a lazy drag of her foot up the outside of his leg.

The skirt of her dress fell away, the high slit leaving her leg completely bare as she bent her knee at his hip. She pulled her revolver from beneath the wide sleeve of black compression fabric riding high on her thigh, handed the gun to him with a smirk much less well concealed than the weapon had been.

“You can keep your fancy nines. I want something reliable.”

She slid the band of black fabric toward her knee and he followed the slow progression.

“It’s worth the hassle,” she continued, voice low and smoky. “For a true shot every time.”

He slipped her gun in his pocket, reached to trace the imprint that the .38 had left on her thigh. Her breath caught, a silent but sudden cessation as his fingertips traveled over soft, sensitive skin, muscles trembling beneath his careful touch. She looked up at him, eyes wide and drowning in shadows. Her tongue darted out to wet her lips and Cullen bit back a groan.

“We’ve been over this,” she whispered.

“We have.” And yet they always ended up right back where they were. Too close for pretending.

“It always ends badly.”

“It hasn’t ended,” he disagreed.

He leaned toward her, not that there was much space left between them anyway. A good deep breath would press his chest against hers, but Cullen could never breathe properly this close to her. If she wore perfume it was the faintest crush of roses and frost just behind her ears. It teased with the warmth of her, a whiff of wood smoke and lonesome wind. He reached for her, palm ghosting over her jaw and she laid her cheek in his hand, eyes falling closed on a sigh.

“Something scared you tonight.” He hadn’t dared think of what could frighten Essa, but he had seen true terror in her eyes for the first time since he had met her. “How close did we come to losing you?”

He mapped the impression of the barrel on her leg with his index finger, dragged the tip of his fingernail over the sharp indentation left by the trigger.

“I don’t know,” she breathed the confession against the heel of his palm. He could feel the heat from her lips as she pulled them back from his skin denying them both. “I’ve never felt that kind of hatred, Cullen. Whatever that thing is, it wants something more from me than the amulet before it sees me dead. I got the feeling death would be the easy part.”

He wanted to tell her that she was safe, but then Essa always made him want to give her promises they both knew he couldn’t keep. Maybe it was time he started. Cullen grazed his lips across her cheek, just beneath the black edge of her mask, nuzzled down to her chin until she gave him the smooth column of her throat and her hands fell back to grip the edge of the desk behind her. Her leg was still wrapped around his hip; she tugged him closer against her.

“Bad idea.” The warning caught low in her throat, rumbling the air against his lips.

“I don’t care.”

Her eyes snapped open at the brutal declaration and her gaze collided with his.

“I’m tired of waiting.” He watched stars bloom in her eyes at the rough confessions. “Kiss me, Essa. Kiss as if we never broke each other’s hearts.”

“No,” she declared defiant even as she was leaning toward him. “I’ll kiss you like we did, and we’ll be better for the mending.”

Then she pressed her lips to his.

*

The man was going to be the death of her, Essa thought as Cullen kissed her back. His mouth was a shock of contrast, lips gentle like the silk draped over her body, teeth rough, a hard scrape like the weapons still pressed against her skin. He cradled the back of her neck with one hand, drew the memory of her gun against her leg with the other. His touch was light, infinitely cautious, and that was a beautiful lie, wasn’t it? She clung to the desk behind her, torn between arching against him and afraid that if she did, he might not be able to continue the slow trek of his hand up her thigh.

If she was dying tonight, this was the way she wanted to go.

His fingers tangled in her hair, scattered pins with utter disregard for anything beyond burying his hand in the long brown waves. He cupped her head as if she were breakable, something they both knew she couldn’t be, but tonight the embrace felt more honest than it ever had before. Essa shuddered against the delicate touch, caught his bottom lip between her teeth and teased a groaning sigh from him. The sound hit her chest, slid down her body to pool low and hot. She tightened her leg around his hip and his hand slid closer to where she wanted desperately to feel his touch.

“Boss?” Bull’s deep voice came from the other side of the door.  “Everything alright?”

Cullen’s lips lifted on a muttered curse and his forehead dropped to hers, pressing against her mask and the edge of her bruises. For a moment they shared a tangled, serrated breath.

“Fine,” Essa called, shocked to find that she sounded so. “A little banged up, but I’ll be out in a few.”

Bull tapped on the door, a cheerful rapping of acknowledgement. She listened for the sound of a deliberately heavy tread, knew that he had moved away.

“We should probably…”

Cullen’s hand slid back toward her knee, catching the compression holster and drawing it down her leg with a wake of gooseflesh as he stepped away. He knelt to pull the scrap of everknit down her calf, strong fingers hovering over the buckle of her shoe, eyes glinting in the dusky light as he looked up at her. Essa glanced away before she nodded, trying and failing not to tremble as he removed her shoe, every movement so like him. Careful.  Deliberate. Maddening.

The holster followed. He placed her bare foot on the carpet to reach for the other shoe.

“A shame,” she said, as he set both ruined pumps aside. She stepped down, got both feet back under her as he stood. “They put in a valiant effort tonight.”

“They did.” He loomed over her now, though she knew he didn’t mean to. Essa missed the extra height of the continental heels. “Are you—?“

She cut him off with a sharp glance. She didn’t want to discuss her own mortality, no more than she wanted to talk about how every bruised and aching part of her body still wanted him. She reached for her second holster and handed him a dainty silver derringer.

“That poor baby tried,” she said, nodding to the small gun. “But I’m going to need heavy arms before I head back out.”

“Head back out?” He blinked at her in surprise.

“You heard the part about the rip in the sky, yes?” She moved reluctantly away from him, crossed to a large ornate wardrobe.  “I have to get back out there. Kill some demons, attempt to close the thing. Hunt up some clues about our enemy.”

Unless…Essa reached back for the collar of her dress and wisely kept her thoughts to herself.

She never heard him move, but suddenly Cullen was standing behind her, hands lifting her hair from her neck so that she could undo the complicated clasps. She was familiar enough with him now to know the consideration was one without motive, but the intimacy of that kindness was worse than any presumption. The gown slid down to pool at her feet and Essa turned in his arms, rising up on her toes to slant her mouth over the stern line of his lips.

His hands spanned her waist, fingers trailing along her spine beneath the long line of her bustier.

“Essa?”

She frowned against the question that curved his lower lip away from her attentions.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “There’s probably some blood back there.”

He spun her around so quickly she had to slap her hands up on the wardrobe door to keep from falling.

“Maker’s breath! Some?” Cullen shouted. She heard his lungs fill with air and then he was bellowing for Dorian.

Essa kept her balance, shoving him away from her to retrieve a pair of trousers from the wardrobe drawer. She yanked them on just as the door to her room burst open. The lights overhead blared to life without apology.

“ _Fasta vaas_!” Dorian exclaimed, crossing the room in strides no less elegant for their haste. “Woman, what have you done to yourself this time? And your lingerie! Josephine is going to weep.”

“Josephine will have to forgive me.” The black lace was as ruined as her shoes. Though she had to hand it to the garment, it had put up a fight. She was pretty sure the steel stays had cracked one of her ribs.

“I don’t give a damn about her undergarments,” Cullen exclaimed angrily as Dorian moved around her in quick assessment. “What did you do to your arm?”

He had her by the elbow now, fingers a delicate circle beneath the black mass of her bicep.

Essa glared at him. “ _I_ did nothing,” she grated.  “Unless you’re going to blame me for getting snatched up by my arm and thrust at the Fade-torn sky.”

Dorian’s hand were a cool press over her back, magic humming faint and electric, mending flesh as if it were fabric.

“This…creature….it lifted you by one arm?” Cullen asked.

Essa nodded. “Mostly. I wasn’t kidding about the unnatural strength. He slung me around like a doll. I suppose I’m lucky for that. He didn’t do any more damage than the initial attack.”

He had caught her as if she were nothing, slammed her back against a rough stone wall. She remained shocked that even with her coat on, her dress had not taken any damage. But then Josephine knew what she was about and Essa _had_ asked for durable.

She grinned suddenly at the recollection. “I landed on my feet when he threw me. Bastard wasn’t expecting that.”

Dorian muttered a few instructions to Cullen interrupting what Essa knew would have been an impressive string of disapproval. The mage waited for him to leave before he turned Essa around, eyes moving with impersonal assessment over the rest of her.

“Not bad, my friend. You have that poor man on the verge of a conniption.” He wrapped his hands around the bruise on her arm. “Watching him handle his temper is nearly as entertaining as watching him try to handle you. Anywhere else?”

“Her face,” Cullen snapped, returning from the adjoining bathroom with a wet cloth.

He stepped behind her, carefully wiped the dried blood from her newly knitted flesh. Dorian pulled her mask away and grimaced.

“Don’t you dare tsk at me,” Essa said before the familiar sound could slip past his lips.

“What did he do?” Dorian asked, fingers gliding silver-bright with power over her cheek bone. “Grab you by the head?”

“That may have been where his other hand landed,” she admitted with a shrug.

She felt Cullen’s ministrations pause. His breath hit the small of her back, a puff of exasperation that made her shiver.

“There,” Dorian said, stepping back. “It’ll take some time to heal properly of course, but you look considerably better than you did. Get dressed. We’ll await you in the parlor.”

Essa nodded, dropped a kiss on Dorian’s cheek before reaching automatically to wipe the lipstick from his skin. He caught her hand, darted a glance to her lips.

“You haven’t any left.” His grin was sly. “You both might want to…”

He gestured toward his face with one hand and Cullen flushed, cheeks coloring brightly beneath the crimson smudges.

*

“Absolutely not.” Cullen’s voice was hard and quiet, all attempt to shout over the din of a seven clamoring voices cast aside as his temper finally caught, pulled his knuckles bright white against the too-tight grip on his glass. As one body, they turned to him, faces a near comical array of shock and confusion.

Their planning was not going well.

“And why not?”

Essa was the first to speak against the rapid descent of silence and the slow inhalation that preceded her careful question reminded Cullen that of those present, she was as much a match for his anger as Cassandra. She barely looked up from her cup of coffee and even as he recognized the tactic for what it was, Cullen fell for it, gaze lingering on her face, searching, his focus redirected from the others as he waited for her to meet his eyes.

“You can’t just charge back out to fight a half dozen demons with a magical artifact you don’t understand.” He tried for reasonable; the flash in her eyes suggested he’d managed mildly insulting.

“The demons aren’t exactly the tricky part,” she said, rising from her seat adjacent to him. She leaned across the table, body stretched across the dark stained oak as she drew a circle on the rough map she had made earlier. “They don’t seem to be able to come much past the rift, and they’re killable.I took out a few before my new friend showed up.”

She shifted subtly, hip grazing his elbow.  There was something seriously wrong with him, that in the midst of danger, he was thinking of taking her back to her room and--

“But if every one you killed was simply replaced with another…”

Their group was silent, content after so many disputes to let Cullen and Essa debate more civilly. As the energy in the room shifted, Josephine stood, made her way to the wet bar with nimble grace and began pouring drinks for all of them. Save Essa, they were all still in their formalwear, a polished ensemble of black and white, satins and velvets. Only Cullen, Cassandra, and the Iron Bull were without masks. Essa was still wearing her hastily stepped into trousers, Cullen’s tuxedo jacket over her tattered bustier. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, waited for her to push away from the table so that he could stop staring at her ass. Essa was, of course, not obliging.

“That’s why we need to close the rift.” She stretched once from her toes, arms reaching toward the center of the large table. Cullen closed his eyes and sought every patience.

“Which you don’t even know how to do,” he reminded her as she finally straightened.

“Dorian has been studying the amulet for two days,” she pointed out, as if that were a much longer length of time.

“Yes,” Cullen emphasized, taking the advantage where he saw it. “ _Dorian_ has. You have not.”

She folded her arms beneath her breasts, and Cullen glanced away from the brief flash of bronze skin and black lace that teased from the deep v of his jacket.

“Well that’s an easy enough fix,” Dorian spoke up just brightly enough that Cullen suspected he had been played. “I’ll take our fiercest guns and the amulet.”

He smiled charmingly at Cassandra and the Iron Bull, waved his hand toward the glowing green necklace that sat, front and center, on the table between all of them.

“Slay some demons, run some preliminary tests, and close the wretched thing if possible, while _you_ ,” he turned his grin to Essa. “Hunt down our fearsome villain.”

“Sounds good to me.” Essa shrugged, bumped Cullen’s shoulder as she paced past him around the table.

“Excellent.” Cassandra’s pronouncement was sudden and final, heading off any argument that might have been made. She leveled an unyielding glare around the table and found little opposition.

Cullen cleared his throat only to be interrupted by Dorian and Essa’s unanimous disbelief.

“Really?” The pair exchanged a hopeful smile.

“Yes,” Leliana seconded Cassandra’s affirmation quickly and before Cullen could insist on a vote he knew he would lose, Essa pounced on Dorian with a glad whoop.

“Dorian Pavus!” She caught the startled mage by the shoulders and planted a loud kiss on his lips. “I can’t thank you enough.”

She may have been the one to find the artifact, may have been the one currently being pursued for said artifact, but she had made no allusions to actually wanting anything to do with it.

“I owe you so big.”

Dorian, a mischievous gleam in his eyes, managed to keep a neutral face as he smoothed one wing of his impeccable mustache.

“None of that now, my darling girl.” He caught Essa by the hands, set her a safe distance from his chair, and stretched his long legs out before him. “You don’t owe many, but rumor has it you usually wind up naked with them.”

Essa’s hands flew to her hips. “I do _not_.” She snapped a scandalized glower across the table at Varric. The dwarf didn’t bother looking up from his notes. “That very short list happens to include my sister!”

Cullen—halfway through a defeated sip of subpar whiskey—promptly choked.  

Essa rounded on him. “ _Really_?!”

“What?” he coughed, somehow refrained from hiding his blushing face in his hands. He knew exactly what she was insinuating, to show any sign of weakness or acknowledgment would be beyond damning. He lifted his chin. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

She ignored him. “I had no idea.” Essa shook her head in complete bemusement. “That you were such a deviant, Rutherford.”

“Riiiightt,” the Iron Bull drawled, lifting his flask to Cullen in a toast. “Because wanting two beautiful women crawling over you is the height of depravity.” He took a sip, leered at her. “And you two looking so much like twins.”

Essa spun so quickly she nearly fell. Josephine giggled, merriment bearing an edge of relief now that things were somewhat settled. She dodged Essa’s sudden movement to place a tray on the table.

“You!” Essa gasped at Bull in only somewhat feigned betrayal.

“First our hero reveals a baffling appreciation for lingerie,” Varric intoned dryly. “And now this! What new levels of debauchery will he sink to next?”

“Shut up, Varric!” Essa turned a shade of crimson that Cullen didn’t think even he could match. “You’re not helping.”

“Far be it for me…” Varric’s words tapered to a hearty chuckle.

Essa scrubbed one hand across her face, pointed one finger imperiously at Cullen who, despite being the butt of the joke, was close to laughing himself.

“No thinking about my sister that way.” She pivoted on the balls of her feet to face Bull, hands on her hips. “You either, unless you’ve some honorable intentions to go with those thoughts.”

“Yes,” Bull shook his head in slow contradiction of the affirmative. “Honorable.”

There was collective hilarity from the rest of them. Leliana’s giggle was a tinkle of music; the Iron Bull’s deep guffaws filled the impossibly sophisticated space.Tension eased from the space between Cassandra’s dark eyes.

“Tea for you, Cassandra?” Josie offered her a delicate porcelain cup.

“Yes, thank you.”

“For me as well.” Leliana leaned forward, one hand held out in askance.

“And me,” Essa added, curling into a chair between the Seeker and the Spymaster. “Thank you, Josephine.”

“Of course.”

The tone of the room slid smoothly from heightened apprehension to cooperative preparation. They had a plan now. One Cullen might not like, but it was decided just the same.

*

Midnight lay behind them by the time Leliana left, a copy of Essa’s rough map clutched within her dagger-sharp mind, eyes shining bright and blue like the unmarred sky they all hoped to see come morning. Essa didn’t know how many of her people waited in the damp streets of Halamshiral, but she had been assured there would be enough to set up a perimeter, to keep watch and wait for Dorian, Cassandra, and the Iron Bull to make their attempt on a nightmare torn from a children’s fairy tale. Josephine and Varric had returned to the ball, conferring with Sera—who had never left—and gathering what intel might stand a chance of saving the empress from a threat not yet identified. Essa had only one real objective, to lure out her dark magister, and put an end to everything.

“You look beautiful,” Cullen assured her for the fifth time in twice as many minutes.

Essa smoothed her gloves down the sides of her gown, cast a glance toward a wall of shining mirrors, and heard the words he had been unable to say once they left the comparative privacy of her room. She looked dangerous. Deadly.  A long cascade of grey velvet hung from her breasts to her feet, full skirt heavy enough that walking required an extra swing in her step. Twin splits ran up to just above her knees, fell secret within the heavy drape. The low back was daring, made for an easy draw from the compression holster that rode her hips. She could reach her weapons, had a smaller derringer hidden a little closer to her draw.

“Are you ready?” he asked offering his arm. Despite the doubts he had expressed earlier, he stood beside her, bearing stern and unflinching.  Essa had been surprised to find that beneath his doubt lay faith abiding. Come what may, he had told her, it all ended tonight.

By the Mabari, she was beyond ready.

“I am.” They stood at the top of the wide, red carpeted stairs, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe.  Essa stared down at the twirling, shimmering dancers, shot a glance up to the balcony where the Empress stood, resplendent in emerald and indigo, a peacock among puffin. “Though, I don’t know this dance?”

The music was old, a haunting of violins and woodwinds. The lights in the ballroom had been lowered, and crystal scattered the dim light like candle flames.

“It’s just another waltz,” Cullen murmured as she took his arm. “Fereldan. A partner swapping dance. Should serve your purposes as we’ll each be dancing with half the people here.”

Essa nodded, was about to go over the long list of orders— _don’t engage, be careful, seriously, Cullen, if you think you see him wait for me,_ that sort of thing—when they reached the final step of their descent.  The fear hit her like a wave, burnt black edged with sickly green, and suddenly she was scrambling in the streets of Halamshiral, mortality assured as a creature of nightmare bore down upon her.

“Essa?” Cullen’s voice drew her back and she clung to him as he pulled her into a turn to join the sea of dancers. “Breathe, darling.”

She fought for it, hands sweating in her gloves, chest tight against the rigidly tailored bodice of her gown.

“Now talk to me.”

“He’s here,” she floundered, rallied,  concentrated hard on the steady pressure of his hands, palm to palm, bare palm to naked shoulder blade. He had foregone his gloves and now she knew why. “I thought it was just my own fear earlier, but…I think it’s some sort of aura?  Do you feel…?”

“Nearly overwhelming dread,” Cullen finished for her. “Yes, though I don’t understand how no one else seems to.”

They swayed into a corner step and he held her closer than propriety dictated. Essa took the comfort for what it was, leaned against him for a heartbeat longer than she should have.

“Is everyone here a civilian?”

It was possible. The empress had her mage, of course, and there were templars on her security detail but…

“Maybe it has a small area of effect,” Cullen mused against her ear as the music rose. He guided them into an elegant pair of turns.

“Maybe,” Essa nodded. “Maybe our little scrap earlier took more out of him than I thought.”

She glanced around furtively, trying to control fear she couldn’t trust as hers.

“Here comes the swap,” Cullen warned.

A gentle squeeze of his hands, then the music rose and half the dancers twirled away from their partners into the waiting arms of another. Essa’s gloves fell to fine wool, black at the shoulder, white at the hand. Essa stared past the heavy gold mask, found the jaded blue eyes that might have belonged to any Orlesian courtier, and sighed with a mixture of regret and relief. Adrenaline stung through arms, choked the back of her throat, clawing forward toward her lips until she could no longer remember the taste of kisses stolen only moments before.  She glanced around, saw Cullen step through a graceful turn, a radiant sylph in glimmering white floating in his arms. Essa’s partner was mute, focus falling briefly to her bruised face, disapproval clear in the extra space he left between them, just this side of etiquette’s breach.

Any other time, she might have laughed, but not now, not so close and fear-stricken.

The music persisted clear and engaging, its nostalgic cheer seemed to transport the entire palace into some long forgotten dream. The feeling of dread waxed and waned as Essa tumbled along, caught up in the spectacle, carried along with the balletic flow of dancers far more skilled than she. She watched the floor from the corner of her eyes, followed the endless rounds of antique music as she circled the floor with one partner after another. She had almost given up, and she and Cullen had almost circled back to one another when a too-gentle hand took hers.

“You are your defiance, Herald.”

Unnatural terror seeped through her glove, sank past her skin to set barbs against her jangling nerves. A hot breath stirred the flyaway hairs behind her ear and Essa rocked back on her heels, scrabbled to correct her fumbled footwork as she looked at him, quickly cataloguing the same description of the man who had attacked her earlier. White jacket, white tie, long tailored lines of impeccable black running from broad shoulders to lean hips, perfectly polished shoes. His hair was a shock of the same, smoothed back from the most intricate mask she had ever seen. She could see nothing of his face, not even a gleam of madness in his eyes.

“It would be an admirable trait,” he continued, voice as smooth as his cornerstep. “If you were not turning your not  inconsiderable tenancity to interfering in my work.”

His fingernails scraped across her bare back as his palm settled into place. The lack of gloves was an affront. Essa’s skin crawled beneath the unwanted touch and she stumbled once as he dragged her into the rise and fall of the music.

“Tell me.” Light the color of her amulet flared behind the obfuscating web of his mask. The silver and gold had been spun into a fine mesh, blocking the entirety of his face but for that brief flash of sickly green. “What interest could you possibly have in me and mine?”

His grip on her hand was slowly increasing. Firm to bruising. She wondered if he would stop before he crushed bone, or if he expected the display to act as some sort of deterrent. Essa pushed against his palm, managed to regain her footing for a pair of steps.

“This the part where I tell you about the dragon?” she managed between gritted teeth. “Or how my brother died in glittering red?”

His hold eased from her back, fingers sliding into an almost gentle prompt for an underarm turn. The music faltered, a lovely fall of sweet birdsong. He pitched her back into a fold over his arm, breath hot against her collarbone and terror crawled up her body, dragged at her legs and feet like swamp mire.

“You could,” he offered.

Essa swallowed thickly, pushed him away, even as she clung to hand in hers.

“I don’t even know your name.” The simpering flirtation might have fooled anyone listening, but the cruel smile it engendered could be mistaken for nothing but malice.

The music changed, lifted a familiar dance toward the gold vaulted ceiling and Essa’s flagging spirits with it.

“Do you need to?”

She summoned a smile and more bluster than even she would have thought she was capable of. She spun close, then away, came back to face him with rigid frame of arms, elbows out in a sharp parallel to the polished floor.

“I generally like to keep account of the people I’ve killed.”

Her brazen declaration surprised a laugh from him, and that arrogant exultation was everything Essa had hoped to hear. The pain in her chest eased, breath returning in cold relief. Oh, how easily pride could topple. For the first time tonight, she believed the chance she had insisted they had. Dread was soon replaced with grim expectation. A little bloodthirsty glee that she thought she should probably pray about.

“You can’t kill me,” he chuckled, stepped her through a quick three step, turned out into a stately promenade. “I am Celene’s esteemed guest. You wouldn’t make it off of the floor before her guards riddled that beautiful gown full of holes.”

 _Wouldn’t_ not _won’t_. Essa smiled. Oh, yes, she, knew this man. Perhaps not him specifically, but she had fought dozens of his like, killed her share of more. Mages and templars and demons who thought themselves untouchable. She could only hope if she ever became a villain, she would maintain enough humility to keep a little good sense.

“I’m sure it would be quite the scandal.” Essa stopped counting breaths, forgot about her own pounding heartbeat and concentrated on dancing with the mage before her. “The poor Orlesian elites wouldn’t feel safe in their empress’s company for years.”

The steps were simple, the count a familiar repetition of quick-quick-slow. She was fond enough of the dance, had watched it performed with dramatic flair on stage by partners much more talented, but she had found her footing, felt that certainty seep into her arms and legs even as the bones in her hand grated together and terror slid like blood down her spine.

“Of course, that seems up your alley. There would be chaos in Orlais for years after the assassination,” Essa continued. “What with the rifts and the coup and the red lyrium flooding the streets.”

He snapped her fingers then, both pinky and ring finger. Essa couldn’t hide her gasp pain or the tears that blurred her eyes. She stepped forward too quickly, brought the bladed heel of her boot down on his instep and was rewarded for her defiance with a broken middle finger. She bit down on the inside of her lip, tasted blood. Maybe, she thought, she should stop goading him while she still had a working trigger finger.

“You know far too much,” he said, surprise dropping his voice into something heavy and cloying as the pyre.

She fought the dark compulsion, pushed back the certainty of failure, the suffocating sense of doom.

“I really do,” Essa laughed; a zing of hysteria gilded the honest sound. “Though I admit, I’m surprised you came to kill her yourself.”

She slipped through a turn, watched a spray of blood spatter in a shimmering arc across the pale marble floor. Maybe the terror had been a little less metaphoric she thought idly. She let go of his shoulder, reached back to ruin ruin her gloves with the four trails of blood tracking down toward low slung velvet.

“Too many slip ups after Kirkwall,” he muttered, lips flattening into a line as if he hadn’t meant to give such an admission. “Besides, I knew you were bringing me what I wanted. There really wasn’t much else for me to do while I waited.”

“But I didn’t.”

“What do you mean you didn’t?” Her right hand suffered for her taunt and Essa bit back a cry. Ruined now, she thought in annoyance. “I can feel it on you.”

“A rather complicated charm,” she admitted as his fingers bit more deeply into her back. She swooned forward, pulled her body taut and caught at his shoulder again just before she brushed against his torso. “I honestly didn’t expect it to work.”

If she lived through this, she owed Dorian money. Dammit.

Her partner started to cast her aside, but Essa held on, fingers grinding white against his tuxedo jacket.

“Hard to believe you’re the head of the snake.”

“What?” he hissed so perfectly timed that she giggled.

Battle fury surged, cast the ballroom into sharp relief. Essa reached back for his hand again, made a pretense of trying to drag his bloody fingers from her flesh. “I almost hate never learning your story, ser, but I don’t have to know your name.”

Her hand slipped. The angle was awkward, her hand was slick. She was shit with her left, but there was nothing to be done for it.

“You insolent, child.”

He snapped her arm as if it were kindling, threw her to the floor with a shout for the guards. She landed in a pile of skirts, one leg twisting beneath her.

“I really am,” she said.

Maybe one day Leliana would piece together their villain’s no doubt riveting tale, but Essa knew better than to give him breath to boast or cast. She drew her gun from the compression holder slung low on her hips and filled his face with six rounds of enchanted .38s. The first shot stunned the assembly, the second summoned a symphony of screams. By the time his body hit the floor, Essa had begun to regret the necessity of executing the man in front of the entire Orlesian court. But dead was dead, and whether she knew his name or not, that one had needed killing.

She lifted a barrier around them both and set the twitching body aflame.

“That’s for Cari.” She watched as the predicted hail of bullets fell impotently against a bubble of shimmering cyan. “And for Cullen. And perhaps a little bit for Mathieu.”

Essa holstered her gun, got her feet back under her, and rose with more grace than she expected. She smoothed her hand down the long line of her skirt and watched smoke rise in velvet curls toward the ceiling.

“I never really was that fond of him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End!
> 
> Mostly. :D There is an Epilogue and a ton of thanks to a ton of you that I'll hopefully post tomorrow night. But until then, please let me know what you think, I would absolutely love to hear from you.


	7. Epilogue: Until Forever

The last time Cullen saw her, Essa was surrounded by the two dozen palace guards, the flat blue-black stares of twenty-four nine millimeters trained on her head as if she were the most dangerous creature in Orlais. And maybe she was, but if she had born them any harm they would have been scattered at her feet with the ashes of her enemy. Which, looking back, probably wasn’t the smartest thing to have yelled at the Empress of Orlais, but he had been having a bit of an off night.

Cassandra, Dorian, and the Iron Bull burst into the ballroom just about the time the body at Essa’s feet stopped smoking. It was all very dramatic, but then, that was Halamshiral. A torrent of color and light to hide the sins of a city as mired in corruption as Kirkwall could only dream of being. Cullen had lost count of the number of swooning, fainting ladies who had been quickly carted from the floor, hadn’t bothered counting the number of calls for Essa’s head mingling with genuine screams and delicate gasps of affected shock.

For her part, Essa stood serene, the hem of her skirt brushing white marble just beyond an arc of crimson. Her chin was lifted, hair a fallen mass around her still bruised face, gaze as dark as her gown but infinitely colder.  She cradled her broken right arm with her left hand while blood ran from the gouges on her back, dripped from the fingertips of one velvet glove. When they declared her under arrest, she smiled.

Smiled!

Maker’s breath, if Cullen hadn’t known before that he loved her—utterly, perpetually, and so damned gladly!—he knew it then. He had never been so proud to have stood beside another.

And he had never been so worried in all his life.

“She’s fine, you know.”

Cullen’s glance at Sera was short, brittle. Essa in captivity didn’t bear thinking on.

“Won’t make it to the dungeon,” she added with an unconcerned shrug, shoulder peaking above the dropped collar of her otherwise unusually subdued white dress. She pulled a grimace.  “That’s gotta hurt.”

They weren’t gentle when they pulled Essa’s arms behind her back, didn’t care about her broken bones or the fine tremble that strummed through her body when they slapped the cuffs on her wrists. Cullen had taken two steps toward them before Sera grabbed his arm and held on, slipped one foot between his so that nearly tripped over her.

“I’ll grapple you if I have to.” She made a show of righting herself against him, smoothed the wrinkled lapels of his jacket back into place. “You’ve got an hour.” She slid a thin envelope into his inner coat pocket in a motion so deft he nearly missed it.

“What?” Cullen blinked once in confusion, continued staring at the spectacle as Essa was led away.

“Look for the hot blonde in the red dress,” she said with a grin. “Get her arm in a sling, maybe take her home, go fishing.”

“What?”

Sera snickered. “You really think we didn’t expect an international disaster?” She pushed him toward the nearest exit. “Go get laid, Jackboot. Don’t talk to anyone for at least a month.”

*

“What are you doing?” Essa asked, voice low and sweet with the lingering chains of slumber.

She yawned once and stretched her legs beneath him. Outside, dawn had unfurled bright, watercolor wings, painted violet mountains capped with blushing snow across the dark surface of the lake. There were no shadows here in Cullen’s reclaimed childhood home, and Essa wondered if the quiet, yearning certainty she felt tight in her chest was anything like what he’d felt at Seaside.

“I’m just following Sera’s orders,” he murmured, feathering kisses over the fading furrows across her back.

It had become an oft repeated refrain since Cullen and Sera’s jennies had smuggled her out of Halamshiral on a cold midnight freight.

Essa chuckled, arched back against the hallowed weight of tender kisses. The magister’s fury would leave scars, but after weeks of her own rough healing and Cullen’s mundane, but infinitely more careful, attention, they had all but passed into new pink flesh.

“Mmhmmm…” she groaned, wiggled once in half-serious enticement. Cullen’s hands stroked her hips, fingers cool and rough against the fire that lay banked beneath her skin.

“Good morning.” Essa rolled over, rested her still mending arm out to the side. “You might be setting a pace you can’t maintain, Rutherford.”

Cullen scowled, brows drawing down over eyes warm and bright as clover honey. He folded his hands over  her stomach, then laced his fingers together to make a basket for his chin.

“That sounds suspiciously like a challenge.” He placed a biting kiss on her belly button, swept his tongue inside so that her breath stuttered and her eyes crossed. “Need I remind you we’ve done pretty well these four weeks?”

Essa settled back against the pillows, arched a brow at him. “Because four weeks is _such_ ,” she drew out the word. “A very long time.”

“For us it is,” he countered, lips a stern line that she didn’t believe for a moment.

She reached for his cheek, the affection slow and unguarded as she traced the dark scruff on his jaw, walked her fingers to his temple.

“You’re right.” She tugged gently on an errant curl, darted her gaze up to the ceiling and watched sunlight stroke gold across heart of pine. “Three days. Now four weeks. What _will_ we go for next?”

“How about always?” he asked so softly that Essa was certain she had misheard him.

“What?” she whispered frantically.

Her hasty attempt to sit up only dragged his chin distractingly lower. Cullen caught her hips, tugged her back down so that her legs fell on either side of his body.

“I’m sorry—“ an intriguing blush warmed his cheeks and he looked away. “This wasn’t how I meant to ask—Not that I’m asking anything,” he added quickly before she could even attempt to form a reply. “I know it’s too soon for that, but—“

Essa stared at him, eyes too wide, words too tangled behind the missteps that had gone before. Hope was a brilliant, painful glare on a horizon she had never expected.

“Maker’s breath…I know that we still have so much—” he cleared his throat, dragged in a deep, shuddering inhale before continuing staunchly. “I just wanted you to know my intention.”

The treasured angles of his face were gilded in early morning light, eyes fierce, lips tugged into an almost frown, as if he blamed her for the awkward tumble of precious words.

“What’s your intention?” Essa asked so breathlessly that he smiled.

“To keep you,” Cullen said simply, honestly.

He eased up her body, until they were fitted against each other, hips to chest, hearts a tandem beat in the valley between her breasts. He held himself up on his arms, just enough to meet her incredulous stare.

“Until…?”

“Until always.” He dipped his chin toward hers, placed a gentle kiss on quivering lips, kissed her again when she finally smiled wide against his mouth. “Until forever.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, dear readers, this is it! The End.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading my noir au. This started as a series of prompts on tumblr back in July. I never expected it to become a full-fledged work with so many characters and unexpected backstories. The entire Garrett Hawke and Essa thing took me completely by surprise, but ended up being one of my favorite things. There are so many of you who have encouraged me and I *think* that I got all of you tagged on tumblr, but if I didn't, please, PLEASE know how much your support and comments have meant to me. 
> 
> Next week I'm going to compile all the Essa and Garrett drabbles/ficlets and get them on here as well as a work with the extra drabbles and such that didn't make it into the main work. This has been so much fun. I hope you've enjoyed it too.
> 
> As always feel free to leave me your thoughts. I treasure all of them. <3


End file.
